RTA makers exploring new niches
By Tom Edmonds -- Furniture Today, December 26, 2004
High Point — When it comes to ready-to-assemble furniture, expect the unexpected.
The flat-pack furniture business was forced into a corner a few years ago when the sales spigot suddenly went dry on what had become its largest category, home office. While a few fringe players gave up the ghost, the survivors adapted to the realities of the new market, which requires more creative designs, new ideas and international sourcing.
The twin drivers of RTA continue to be entertainment and home office, but the products that make up those categories today hardly resemble what was selling as recently as five years ago. The remarkable transition, which reduces the emphasis on pure-panel processing from domestic factories, has been driven by growing retailer and consumer demand for style and function, at always-competitive prices.
RTA also has been expanding its presence in categories both old and new. When the PC boom that drove SOHO furniture petered out a few year ago, sources turned first to entertainment, which was starting to take off because of new televisions hitting the market. While entertainment has been a fairly strong growth category for three years, it clearly could not match the powerful gains that home office had been generating.
To augment their top-line performance, producers and importers renewed their interest in bedroom, storage and kitchens. Industry veterans know that those are not new RTA categories, but many of the latest programs — O'Sullivan licensing with Coleman for garage storage or Sauder setting up a program with Hot Rod magazine, for instance — were aggressively innovative. Other new-for-the-furniture-industry ideas that have hit the market recently have included closet organizers and craft carts.
The kitchen category, where carts and islands are all the rage, is probably the best example of the increasingly diverse nature of RTA. These kitchen carts are both stylish and functional — employing eye-catching top surfaces of stone, wood or metal, over the sort of useful doors, drawers and wine racks that RTA companies design so effectively.
Thus, the kitchen business is part domestic, part imported and entirely different from what it used to look like 15 or 20 years ago. This kind of transition is taking place across the RTA universe.
The trend toward global sourcing in RTA appears to be accelerating. Design houses that source offshore such as Coaster, Linon Home, Studio RTA and Z-Line Designs are growing rapidly. These and other sources also are evolving their lines from cheap-looking metal and glass to more substantial designs from a variety of materials, including sophisticated wood solids and veneers. Not surprisingly, the domestic RTA majors are working hard to set up their own import operations.
The panel-processing factories are still out there, and flat-pack executives must keep them as busy as they possibly can. But it's been tough, and several have closed or, in the case of Bush Furniture, been converted to producing assembled case goods. Flat-pack furniture factories that have managed to maintain rather than lose sales over the past four years are rare, and recent steep increases in particleboard costs have not helped.
To keep their factories busy, producers are going to have to be increasingly creative in bringing function and value to the market as the bar has been raised too high to go back to the simple looks of yore.
-
Just the Stats: Home office
Mar 22, 2011 -
Unsung hero: Furniture designer Joe Miller
Aug 10, 2009 -
RTA revival
Mar 5, 2006 -
RTA makers 'holding their own'
Jan 6, 2008
Featured Company
-
Wright Labels
Bill and Tom Wright founded Wright of Thomasville in 1961 on the idea that printing was a creative medium and the belief that "a promise made is a promise kept." The Wright brothers focused their attention on providing exceptional printing for the... more
VIEW ALL GALLERIES
