Trident Home Works With Retailers on Product Design
Heath E Combs -- Furniture Today, October 12, 2011
Trident Home Inds. will introduce this No. 5474 bedroom group and several others at this month’s High Point Market.
HIGH POINT - Industry veterans Gil Sturtzel, Tony Smith and Tony Ferguson have formed Trident Home Inds., a company that will work with retailers to develop furniture collections.
Although its main emphases will be OEM wood furniture designed with retailers, Trident also will develop pieces on its own and will show them at furniture markets. All of the product will be made in Asia.
While the partners previously have done OEM projects overseas for manufacturers, and have worked with a number of factories for decades, the new company is different because it will work directly with retailers to develop collections, according to Sturtzel.
"We are not limited to the strengths and weaknesses of one factory. We can take advantage of a factory's strengths along with our expertise in engineering and design to bring real value to the marketplace," he said.
Instead of designing a group and shopping it around for the best price or open capacity at a factory, the partners can chose a factory that is best suited to produce the product and for the best value, he said.
"We can work with multiple factories and take advantage of our relationships with them, which have been through almost 30 years," Sturtzel said. "We understand what their capabilities are so when we design something, we'll pretty much design and tailor it and put it where it should be."
Each of the partners has been involved in imports from Southeast Asia since the 1980s. All three worked at Pacific Marketing International in the early 1990s.
Ferguson, who lives in Vietnam, was vice president of Asian operations for IFM/Standard and Home Meridian International and most recently was with Kimball Hospitality. Smith has handled product design and development for several companies and lives in Cebu, Philippines.
Sturtzel is a former senior vice president of imports for Bell Furniture Inds. and Davis International. He has worked on several OEM design and sourcing projects with major retailers in the past several years.
The company will have quality control offices in Cebu, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Muar, Malaysia, in addition to staff in China. It will produce furniture in all those countries.
In High Point, the company will offer what it calls value-driven bedroom collections from Vietnam and Malaysia, along with a small collection of accent pieces from the Philippines and television stands from China. The product will be designed by a U.S.-based freelance design team, Sturtzel said.
Three-piece bedroom groups will range from $999 to $1,699 retail. Sturtzel said Trident's factory partners have onsite warehousing and can mix and ship goods quickly.
Trident has shipping programs in place with Zenith Logistics and Schenker Logistics and will also offer financing. At the High Point Market, which runs Oct. 22-27, it will show at Center Point, space 210-212.
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