Ashley growing in SF
Investors plan up to a dozen Bay Area stores
By Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, January 29, 2007
Rohnert Park, Calif. — Owners of a Southern California Ashley Furniture HomeStore are pushing into the San Francisco Bay area and plan to open up to a dozen dedicated stores there.
California Furniture Solutions, a four-member investment group, opened its second Bay-area store Dec. 16 in Rohnert Park, a suburb of Santa Rosa. That followed the successful August opening of an Ashley store in Fairfield. A third is under construction in Fremont, and there are plans for six to nine more over the next three years.
The stores are averaging 46,000 square feet and each is projected to do about $17 million in annual sales, said Roy Corn, CFS co-owner. That should quickly propel California Furniture Solutions into the ranks of Furniture/Today's Top 100 stores.
The other CFS owners are Corn's father, Ed Corn Sr., his father's wife, Christine Corn, and his friend Darrin Marthens.
Ed and Christine Corn operated Affordable Furniture in the Murrieta/Temecula area, southeast of Los Angeles, until they opened their first Ashley HomeStore in Murrieta in 2003. Roy Corn and Marthens were working at Qualcomm as electrical engineers when they decided Ashley stores would be a good investment.
The group soon snapped up a development agreement for the Bay area, focusing on the Oakland side, where the real estate opportunities are greater and a single store can target a wider radius of consumers than on the more congested San Francisco side, Roy Corn said.
He believes consumers in the area have been underserved in furniture for years.
"There really aren't any big boxes (appealing to the broad middle market) and not a lot of advertising going on," Corn said. "The market primarily is populated with mom-and-pop stores. Levitz is here, but it's not the powerful player it used to be."
He added that no other regional or super-regional big names have taken the plunge into the San Francisco Bay area. California Furniture Solutions was more than happy to fill the void.
"In our previous lives, it was all about just-in-time manufacturing — how to design product and bring components in just in time to offer the lowest possible price to consumers," Corn said. "Ashley's model is just that. You have no inventory except for your showroom.... We're always getting the best price for our customers."
The fast-growing Ashley HomeStores network was No. 2 on Furniture/Today's survey of Top 100 furniture stores last year, with estimated 2005 sales of $1.6 billion. The chain of licensed and company-owned stores reached about 300 units nationwide by the end of last year, up from 219 stores at the end of 2005.
In the Bay area, CFS is looking at expansion opportunities in Walnut Creek and Concord, among other areas.
Roy Corn wouldn't disclose the group's projected investment in the rollout, noting it will vary from store to store. He said the new stores are off to a strong start despite the overall softness in furniture retailing in California and nationally.
"We adjusted our expectations to the softness we saw in Southern California before opening (in the Bay area), and (because of that) we're fairly well on track," he said.
