Home office shows maturity
Tom Edmonds -- Furniture Today, December 26, 2004
High Point — A mature category now, home office has settled into a happy place. Following a shakeout during the early part of this decade, the business has settled into a nice routine, and the category's specialists, from RTA and promotional on up to mid-priced and high end, are enjoying solid, sometimes strong results.
The SOHO business is benefiting from several trends encompassing everything from new-home designs to modern lifestyles and corporate downsizing.
In real estate, offices are built into most new homes, and these rooms are often centrally located in prestige positions on the main floor. This has been an advantage particularly for the high-end producers and others who specialize in executive office designs.
Ten years ago, it was the introduction of Windows '95 that sparked the five-year-boom in personal computers, which suddenly became a required household appliance. In turn, that kicked off the rapid growth in SOHO furniture. Well, computers and peripherals are still selling, requiring more desktop area, more storage and more furniture. The PC phenomenon has slowed from a fast boil to a slow simmer but it's still hot.
More and more people are working from home, setting up home-based businesses, tele-commuting or just putting in some extra hours away from the office. Here again, furniture is required for productivity.
The baby boomlet of the early 1990s is in middle school, getting ready for high school. For a few years, the birth rate spiked up nearly to 5 million per year, approaching the baby boom peak of the '50s. The children of this boomlet are entering the serious-student stage — which is not exclusive of the petulant-teenager phase. Unless they do all their homework on the kitchen table or the family PC, they, too, need desks. Many will get them.
These trends touch a broad swath of the consumer market, which explains why home office is performing well. The market has been leaning recently toward more stylish designs, collections that still have all the function but with a more obvious residential look.
This is particularly evident at the top of the market, where category leaders like Hooker, Stanley, Sligh and others are enjoying nice success with executive office collections that have just as much eye appeal as function and storage.
But this development is certainly not restricted to the carriage trade. With the year-long success of the Christopher Lowell collections at Office Depot, the office-product superstores are moving quickly toward more residential looks, often incorporating wood or metal and glass.
The advent of imports has also played a powerful role for home office, as it has in nearly all furniture categories. Lower cost structures allow import suppliers to add more flash and sizzle while reducing the price.
Having said all that, it's clear that home office is not a dilettante's category. The furniture retailer who expects a desk matched with a credenza and hutch to perform on its own has often been disappointed, and there's no reason to suspect that will change. In fact, this may be the longest-running of all trends affecting home office: It's a specialist's category, requiring a strong selection, sales support and promotion.
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