After nearly two months of a virtual citywide retail shutdown, a sign that reads “$8 Million Store Closing Sale” sounds like a business owner’s worst nightmare.
For Meredith O’Donnell, owner of Meredith O’Donnell Fine Furniture, it’s a result of the luckiest decision she ever made.
Several months ago she decided to leave an expensive, 17,000-square-foot showroom on Post Oak in Uptown Houston and reopen in a similar-sized space at half the cost in the growing design district on Old Katy Road.
She and her staff had planned a massive sale to get rid of not only her showroom’s inventory, but more in a warehouse that could fill her store four times over.
“I’d rather sell my inventory than pay someone to move it,” O’Donnell said of her furniture and accessories marked down 40 percent to 70 percent. Her new business plan includes a new Meredith O’Donnell Fine Furniture showroom side by side with another new venture, the city’s first dedicated Hickory Chair showroom, exciting news for the area’s interior design community.
Ultimately, the pandemic simply slowed down O’Donnell’s plans, making her inventory-reduction sale last longer and delaying just a little her plan to reopen her new showroom and her Hickory Chair partnership. Right now her Post Oak store closes every Wednesday so the staff can rest and replenish what’s left on the floor.
“Sometimes you work at a job and it’s just a job, and you wonder when you can retire. Right now we are so pumped up about it,” O’Donnell said. “The last several months have been strange and discouraging and frightening in some ways, yet there were only a few times I really felt afraid. I feel calm about our plans going forward.”
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, furniture stores have been considered essential businesses that could remain open, though most did not because traffic was so slow and owners feared exposing their own staff to the virus.
Even Jim “Mattress Mac” McIngvale, owner of Gallery Furniture, said when few customers were coming into the store, he kept his staff busy distributing sandwiches and other food to those in need.
The loss of income has been devastating to national chains that have fallen like dominoes. The list of retail stores filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy or closing altogether is growing: Neiman Marcus, Pier 1, Stage Stores, Tuesday Morning, JCPenney, J. Crew and Lord & Taylor.
Houston-area home-furnishings store owners say they can’t really make up for their lost income, but they have used the free time to adapt to a new market, update websites and plan for their future.
Suzanne Coppola added dozens of photos and a 360-degree virtual shopping tour to her antiques store’s Laurier Blanc website, and Courtney Barton has been rebranding her Mela & Roam home-goods boutique to a simpler-named Courtney Barton, located inside The Gray Door antiques store on Ferndale.
At Maison Maison in River Oaks, Suzanne Duin and her small staff looked at the things on their to-do list they never seemed to have time to do and started getting them done.
One staffer who was a new mom was already working mostly from home; another manned the shop; and Duin traveled between her home, store and warehouse.
“This was initially scary, but we turned it into an opportunity to do some things that were never at the top of the list in importance,” Duin said. “We uploaded (photos of) inventory and cleaned up and revamped our website. In a regular economy, we would never have had the time to do that.”
Part of the website upgrade is to accommodate Duin’s new line of lampshades that will launch in mid-July. They’re made of natural fibers such as seagrass and water hyacinth and are described by Duin as “elegant enough for an English manor house.”
At John Brooks & Co. in the Decorative Center Houston, Martha Lurie and her staff closed the to-the-trade store on March 25 — starting to return to the showroom in early May — and continued working from home to stay in touch with clients and handle orders that were in the works. They also spent more time that usual on social media, drawing attention to the johnbrookshouston.com website.
Lurie secured Payroll Protection Plan funding to continue to pay her staff’s salary but knows it won’t last forever.
“We’re good through July 1, then we have to treat this like a business and not like a family. We are sales-based and commission-based in compensation. If shipments don’t come back to a decent level, that affects our compensation,” Lurie said, noting that when furniture manufacturers and freight companies stopped doing business, it affected what she could offer.
So now she’s finding new revenue streams, doing home staging for real estate agents.
“I hope people will focus on their homes now, rather than taking big vacations or buy gas-guzzling SUVs. Maybe they’ll do their work from (new home) offices,” Lurie said.
Lurie hasn’t calculated the pandemic’s effect on her store’s revenue.
“That’s scary to even contemplate. Our financials and revenues are based on shipments, and we had very few shipments in April and very few shipments in May. I don’t even want to think about it, but it’s a significant amount,” she said.
Beyond the pandemic itself, the economic impact will be harsh and long lasting, she said, noting that business survival goes way beyond a two-month shutdown.
Lurie, who’s been in business in Houston for 35 years and survived the gas and oil crash of the 1990s and the 2008-10 recession, now is focused on surviving the current crash in oil prices.
“We’ve seen oil and gas crash and burn, and it gets ugly and doesn’t come back quickly. The effects of COVID-19 were immediate and just unbelievable. The next headlines will be about what’s happening in the Houston economy because of gas and oil,” Lurie said.
“They’re predicting oil and gas won’t come back for maybe two years. Long term, that’s my bigger concern. I think I can make it through this,” she added. “To have that (oil crash) on top of (COVID-19) is very difficult for any business — I don’t care if you’re a restaurant, a furniture store or you’re a dentist.”
diane.cowen@chron.com
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