Futon Furniture Compass Points and the Road to the Frontier

When I began interviewing people and gathering information for this article, I was operating under the impression that I would find retailing secrets applying strictly to the futon furniture marketplace and reflecting, first, a particular retailer's understanding of the product and, second, his own particular business flair. If you're good at selling, you can sell anything right? Well, now, I'm not so sure of that. No doubt, those secrets do exist, but I suspect that success in the futon furniture business from the retailer's point of view has more to do with where you choose to set up camp and how you are viewed by the people who constitute your customer base. I dare say that no matter how sharp a business person you are, if those two factors aren't weighed in your favor, you've got a tough row to hoe.

All of the retailers discussed in this article are successful -- each on his own terms. And I dare say that not one of them would be comfortable -- or maybe the word is satisfied -- in any of the others' shoes. This is one of the conditions I find so fascinating about the futon furniture business in this area, and I imagine that it's pretty much the same across the country. There is a distinct aura of self-reliance about you retailers. On the one hand, it is inspiring to share your sense of mission. On the other, I sense that some of you are on a frontier, and that means that you are pretty vulnerable. But where is the frontier, and how do you make a go of it?

Jordan's Furniture Points Out

I chose to visit four futon furniture retailers in the area. One was Jordan's, a family-owned furniture superstore that carries a truly comprehensive selection of traditional items. The other three were futon furniture stores representing three rather different markets. One was John Buster's original futon furniture store, Bedworks, in Cambridge, MA. -- home of Harvard University and MIT. Including Home Design and Futon Express -- also in Cambridge -- and the Bedworks Warehouse store close by in Allston, Buster's group of four stores represent certainly one of the most well-established and successful chains of futon furniture specialty stores in the northeast. Another stop was at Fly-By-Night, the futon store founded in 1988 by Richard Zafft in Northampton, MA. The third one was Futons, Etc. in Seekonk, MA., one of four stores owned and operated by retailing dynamo Ray King.

What I could not ignore -- and what eventually became the driving premise behind this article -- were the differences between the respective retailing strategies these three successful futon furniture retailers had developed and how each one was so dependent upon the character of the marketplace. I was wrestling, as well, with the puzzling fact that Jordan's -- an enterprise so sophisticated in its retailing strategies that it borders on behavioral psychology -- was not able to mount a successful futon furniture program. This suggested to me that the character of the marketplace had a dramatically more significant impact on the futon furniture marketplace than on the traditional furniture marketplace.

(l to r) Sleep Lab sales associate David Hughes and Peter Bolton of Jordan's Furniture.

Jordan's is a massive furniture store with three stores in the greater Boston area. Joe (Tatulli) and I visited the store in Avon, MA, just south of Boston, where the corporate offices are located. We arrived early, about a half an hour before the store actually opened, for our interview and tour with Peter Bolton, Jordan's Bedding Merchandise Manager. Jordan's is about theater. The theater of merchandising. And I don't mean that in a negative sense at all. Whether you view it as a high art or a high science, Jordan's entertains its customers with a disarming sophistication which I doubt many retail enterprises can even come close to matching.

The Jordan's in Avon presents you with 80,000 sq. ft. of merchandise, all on the second floor of the building. It's hard to imagine even the best sales person staying on top of all the product information. In case the customer is interested, there is a "Fact Finder" card on every SKU in the store with descriptive information, beginning with point of origin and ending with instructions for care. For all its size, there is no sense at all of being lost in a warehouse. The store is strategically laid out in thematic zones, with U-shaped pathways leading you through each one. There is never a sense of being lost -- though I found it rather hard to visualize where I was in the building, at any given time. This layout helps them achieve a remarkably intimate atmosphere in many areas, considering the sheer vastness of the place. Supporting this effort, every zone has its own background music and its own scent which, together, serve to reinvigorate the shopper as he passes from one thematic area into the next. There are also animatronic figures placed around the store to amuse you as you browse through the furniture. In the "Sleep Lab," where they have their small selection of futons and frames on display, they have even rigged the mattresses so that when you lie down on one, the light above it dims slowly so that you are not distracted by the bright light that, otherwise, highlights that mattress.

Jordan's initially committed 1000 sq. ft. to displaying futon mattresses by Gold bond, frames by August Lots, and futon covers by SIS. Now, four units take up no more than 200 sq. ft. It is pretty easy to understand, though, why the category did not fit into their marketing formula. Bolton does not want to view it as their having failed to sell futons. Rather, futons and frames were simply too complex for his sales staff to demo effectively, relative to their traditional sales efforts. They took too much time and provoked too many questions. In other words, they didn't sell themselves. As Peter Bolton said, "the simpler it is, the simpler it is to sell." Most of the furniture carried by Jordan's sells itself, without requiring much demonstration. That's how the sales staff likes it. Futons, on the other hand, require that you know how to work them -- and that you believe in them as a preferable alternative to the sleeper sofa. But if your experience as a sales person is being able to sell three sleeper sofas, at higher price points, in the time it takes you to demo one futon, what's the point?