Rowe Fine Furniture creates treat of a seat

Upholstery maker covers chair in candy

Gary Evans -- Furniture Today, July 12, 2010

Alexis Nichols, top, and Melissa Govoruhk of Rowe use plenty of glue to create the Candy Chair. It’s covered with about $400 worth of Starbursts, gumballs, peppermints and other sweets.

McLEAN, Va. — People who visited the Rowe showroom at the April High Point Market probably spied something that made them hungry.

It was the Candy Chair, covered not in fabric or leather but in hundreds of pieces of chocolate, gumballs, Life Savers, Tootsie Rolls, orange, lemon and lime candy slices, jelly beans, Starbursts, peppermints - you name it.
Senior Graphics Designer Alexis Nichols and her colleague, Senior Merchandise Coordinator Melissa Govoruhk, created the sweet seat.

Nichols is responsible for Rowe's market invitations, and it's her duty to tailor them to the market's style directions. She was trying to come up with the perfect way to illustrate what the company was aiming for.

"I knew the trend we were going with was the candy trend, so we had to figure out a way to combine the furniture and the candy look," she said.

Nichols' creative process took her down several blind alleys, and she even bought stock photographs with various images of candy to depict Rowe's theme, "Eye Candy." No lights went off. Finally, she said, "It kind of popped into my head that it might be more realistic and easy to put candy on a chair."

They commandeered an unused chair at Rowe headquarters here. "We dragged it into my office and Melissa and I sat there with glue guns," said Nichols. "It was three days worth of work," said Govoruhk.

They took four or five trips to Wal-Mart and Costco for bulk bags of miniature Hersheys, Goodbars, Krackels and the like, and to specialty candy stores to fill in extra color. "We obviously wanted to be as colorful as possible and tell the story," Nichols said.

The duo glued ... and glued ... and glued for what felt like forever. It seemed easy, Nichols said, "until we started it. And then it was a bigger task than we thought." They didn't keep track of how many pieces of candy were used. But they wound up spending about $400.

For more on the Candy Chair, see today's print issue of Furniture/Today.