At Premarket in April, Progressive Furniture showcased some of its new accent furniture sourced in India.
HIGH POINT — Progressive Furniture is expanding its accent furniture line with a mix of product from India, a new source country for the line.
At the June 5-9 High Point Market, the company is showing 50 to 60 Indian-produced accent furniture pieces, roughly half of which were shown at Premarket in late April.
Retailing from $299 to about $799, the items include anything from small accent tables and chests to pieces that can double as nightstands, with both shelf and drawer storage. There also are items that can fall within the occasional segment such as cocktail and end tables and sofa tables.
The line is being shown at Progressive’s showroom in space 218 of 220 Elm.
New sourcing options
Up to this point, most of the accent line has been sourced from places like China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mexico. While this existing roughly 170-piece assortment is similar in terms of SKUs, the retails start around $199 and top out around $599.
What the India source product adds is a mix of pieces made with solid acacia and solid mango, two species that are indigenous to that country.
The selection was developed in partnership with several factories that company President Dan Kendrick visited in February 2020, before the pandemic curtailed travel between the U.S. and Asia.
At that time, he visited some 38 factories in four different cities, which represented a wide mix of capabilities and price points, from the low to the upper end.
“It was really informative,” he said of the trip. “I picked three factories that had a diverse offering of product. That was in February of last year. We spent the summer going back and forth with the factories, and we ordered about 90 SKUs.”
He said, in particular, the factories in India are particularly adept with metal — both casting and welding — along with their use of solid wood, both native grown species and reclaimed elm and fir from old buildings, for example.
In addition, the Indian factories also use other mixed media elements such as copper, granite, marble and other types of stone.
He said the Indian-made product also has hand-carved elements similar to what China offered 10 to 15 years ago.
Kendrick noted that, as a number of factories have been doing business with the European market for many years, the sizes of some pieces are smaller or lower in profile than what Americans may be used to. But Kendrick noted that Progressive will continue working with the factories to fine tune the product mix as they develop more product in the future.
The response at Premarket, he noted, was positive, with some dealers writing orders at the show. And as the company has ordered deep, customers will also be able to replenish inventory from its warehouse in Claremont, N.C.
“We have gotten sell- through on it already,” Kendrick said. “The sales reps came to us and said they had a lot of positive conversations about it.
“We rolled the dice on some of it, but with demand the way it is right now, having inventory was a good decision.”
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May 17, 2021 at 05:25PM
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