300th Ashley store opens in Fla.
By Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, February 19, 2007
Daytona Beach, Fla. — Retail veteran Howard Fineman has opened his second Ashley Furniture HomeStore in Florida, a prototype that is the 300th showroom in the nationwide dedicated Ashley network.
The 50,000-square-foot store on International Speedway Boulevard here is packed with features Fineman has picked up from other HomeStores, as well as new ideas designed to improve the shopping experience and service.
It's the second of five HomeStores Fineman plans for northern Florida. His first opened in 2005 as an anchor tenant in the St. Johns Town Center mall in Jacksonville, Fla., and is now the top-volume furniture store in northern Florida, he said. A third 45,000-square-foot store will open in north Jacksonville later this year.
Fineman declined to disclose sales for the first store or project sales for the Daytona unit, but said the two stores together will do over $50 million this year. Stock turns at the Jacksonville store averaged over 50 last year, he said.
By 2010, he expects to be doing $100 million in five stores from Jacksonville south to Daytona.
His company, SFTF (for "swing for the fences"), spent more than $2 million on the Daytona store's interior. Karen Schindler, the company's director of visual merchandising, oversaw the layout and accessorizing of the showroom.
Fineman grew up in the industry, beginning at his father's two-store, credit-oriented furniture business in New York, then went to work for Ashley as vice president of retail development for the HomeStores. He left to open his own HomeStores.
When he started with Ashley in late 2001, there were about 60 stores in the network.
In Daytona, Fineman has updated the Fun Zone kids' area, adding home theater rooms with plasma TV screens and the latest gaming systems.
A 20-bed sleep center is an updated, upscale version with low-intensity lighting and ambient lighting emanating from behind the headboards, spa music, and a 10-foot falling-water feature. His stores carry Simmons bedding and use Simmons' new Sleep Index concept.
The Daytona store has about 4,000 Ashley items and primarily shows goods by lifestyle collection and in special-feature areas. These include four fireplace settings, a marketplace area for home accents and a center courtyard finished in travertine marble, where the store spotlights Ashley's higher-end Millennium line.
Change collected in the courtyard's fountain — and in the Jacksonville and all future Fineman stores — is donated to a local Children's Home Society. Fineman also is working with the American Red Cross on disaster relief for the victims of recent tornadoes in central Florida, helping organize a blood drive and donating furniture.
His stores also have been working with Harry Friedman of the Friedman Group on sales and management training, aiming to enhance the shopping experience on the highest-volume days. Greeters and a paging system for shoppers already have been added, as have automated financing kiosks for quick, private credit approval.
Ashley Chairman Ron Wanek called Fineman's new Daytona showroom a "fabulous store," adding, "He's really a bright guy and a great merchant, and we're very excited about what he's doing."
Fineman and Wanek believe the HomeStores network is now the largest furniture store chain in the nation and possibly the No. 1 furniture retailer. Wanek wouldn't disclose 2006 sales. Furniture/Today estimated 2005 sales for the then-219-store network at $1.6 billion, second only to Rooms To Go.
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