RTG to enter Big Easy
Plans 9 stores on Gulf Coast
By Furniture Today Staff -- Furniture Today, April 28, 2006
AT THE MARKET -- Rooms To Go will open nine new stores over the next two years on and near the Gulf Coast of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, including its first New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., stores.
In part, the move is the next step after the company’s acquisition of the bankrupt Rhodes chain last summer, and its subsequent reopening of 11 Rhodes stores as Rooms To Go. Several of the former Rhodes stores were in the Florida Panhandle and in Mississippi and Alabama.
Rooms To Go will replace the Rhodes boxes in Panama City and Pensacola, Fla., and will open two more stores in Panhandle markets that RTG CEO Jeff Seaman wouldn’t identify. Two of the stores will open by mid- to late 2007 and the other two around mid-2008.In addition, RTG will replace the Rhodes stores in Gulfport, Miss., and Mobile, Ala., by mid-2008. By the end of this year, it should be in New Orleans with a temporary store while it builds its two permanent stores to open in late 2007.Rooms To Go’s first Baton Rouge store also will open by the end of next year. All the new stores will be about 35,000 square feet and some will include Rooms To Go Kids & Teens stores within the stores, said Seaman, who is here this week shopping the furniture market.When a Rooms To Go affiliate teamed with liquidator Great American Group to acquire Rhodes assets out of bankruptcy in August for about $45.8 million, one of the retailer’s biggest motives for doing the deal was to gain Rhodes’ Gulf Coast locations, Seaman said. “It gave us a good way to test the market fairly inexpensively,” he said.
With the acquisition, RTG also got a 300,000-square-foot distribution center in Mobile, which it will expand next month to 600,000 square feet.“Once we were committed with distribution, it made sense for us to invest in the new stores,” Seaman said.
He said Rooms To Go has been successful in the former Rhodes stores — though it won’t release sales by market area — but that it always does more volume with its own store design, which it has honed over the years. Over the next five years or so, the company plans to replace all of the former Rhodes stores it has reopened, including units in Montgomery, Ala., Wilmington, N.C., Columbia, S.C., and Augusta, Fayetteville and Columbus, Ga.Seaman wouldn’t say how much of an investment the overall expansion project will be, but said it’s part of a larger plan to grow by a net 20 stores or so through 2008.Rooms To Go, the largest U.S. furniture store chain with estimated 2005 sales of $1.6 billion, has about 110 stores in the Southeast and in Texas.
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RTG to enter Big Easy
May 11, 2006 -
Rooms To Go expanding
May 28, 2006
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