'No budget' buyers drive high-end motion
By Larry Thomas -- Furniture Today, March 14, 2005
High Point — Home theater seating has never been targeted to consumers with tight budgets, but there's a rapidly growing niche aimed at those who, in effect, have no budget at all.
These ultra high-end products can add thousands of dollars to the cost of a home theater room or media room, but considering that many such rooms have tabs of $50,000 to $100,000 or more, the homeowners hardly notice the added expense.
"People are making home theaters the focal point of their home," said Gabrielle Galardo, marketing manager at Elite Leather, whose luxurious reclining seats retail for $2,000 or more apiece. "We are seeing such huge demand for the product."
Elite and other producers of top-of-the-line home theater seating agree that demand is being fueled by popular new-generation televisions such as plasma and LCD, not to mention the popularity of watching movies on DVD at home.
And of course, consumers don't just buy a single seat. Typically, a row of three or four seats (with a retail ticket of $6,000 to $8,000) is purchased, but more elaborate theater rooms require multiple rows. That easily can raise the furniture tab to $15,000 to $20,000.
"It can be a really nice ticket for a dealer ... and it doesn't overlap with any other categories," said Phil Cooper, vice president of merchandising at Barcalounger. "So they're not taking sales away from some other area of the store."
What makes these seats so expensive? For openers, most consumers want higher grades of leather. Plus, options such as cupholders, arm storage units and power-reclining mechanisms add hundreds of dollars.
Cooper said about 55% of Barcaloun-ger's high-end models are sold with power mechanisms, while officials at Jaymar, a Canadian producer that was one of the pioneers of home theater seating, said at least two-thirds of their seats are sold that way.
"We just keep adding new dealers," said Gary Zuckerman, Jaymar's vice president of U.S. sales. "And more of them are putting several models on the floor."
And there is one added bonus. Men — who generally have little influence in furniture purchases — are often the decision-makers when it comes to the home theater room.
"It's definitely a subject that interests men more," Galardo said.
But are home theaters just a fad that will go the way of, say, those recliners with built-in coolers?
Zuckerman, for one, doesn't think so. The rapid advances in television technology will drive consumer electronics sales — and as a result, furniture sales — for years to come, he reasoned.
"The whole concept of sitting comfortably in front of a new generation television is a phenomenon that hasn't really taken hold yet," he said.
"There's still tremendous upside potential."
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