Trade Shows Are the Road to Retailers for Small Firms

Most home furnishings look pretty much the same. Those with a difference are often offered only by small companies in out-of-the-way locations.

The challenge: How do consumers and companies find one another?

The answer: consumer shows such as the national furniture market in High Point, N.C.

Timbuktu of Longwood, Fla., and Susan Sargent Designs Inc. of Pawlet, Vt., are tiny companies that show at the twice-yearly show and find it a good way to connect with a wider world of retailers.

Kerry Azzarello, an accountant with a Silicon Valley employment history, runs Timbuktu in Longwood. Her husband, Cary Eaker, an electrical engineer, supervises production in Indonesia.

Starting a furniture company had been about the furthest thing from their minds.

“We moved to Singapore in 1991 to run an electronics company,” Azzarello said. “On a vacation trip in 1992, we saw furniture lying on the side of roads in small Indonesian villages. It was made of solid wood and well-priced, and we had never seen anything like it in the United States.”

They ended up buying a 40-foot container of furniture for shipment to the United States.

“We didn’t know how we would sell it, but we bought it anyway,” Azzarello said.

Timbuktu’s pieces have an exotic, Far Eastern feel. Made of woods such as mahogany, teak and a highly figured yellowish wood known as jackfruit, they often have bamboo, iron and leather accents and hand-carved details.

“The Indonesians do not use major power tools and have no assembly line,” Azzarello said. “The furniture is solid hardwood in a style that is unique yet blends with contemporary and traditional furniture. Most people wouldn’t have an entire house of it, although I do.”

Timbuktu offers pieces for every room. Prices range from about $300 for a small chair to $3,600 for a large armoire. As others have begun to import Indonesian furniture, the company has started creating its own designs, made by the original sources.

Susan Sargent is a weaver trained in Sweden whose work was sold in craft galleries. Doing designs for a small foreign company prompted her to start her own company. In 1995, she began to market home accessories such as area rugs, bedding, decorative pillows and ceramics that she designs and has made up in workshops around the world.

Sargent’s products, now totaling about 250, fall between art items sold in galleries and mass-market items. Prices range from $10 for a ceramic mug to about $1,200 for a wool rug. Small furniture pieces will be launched in October in High Point.

“The key thing in all the products is exuberant color,” Sargent said. “Thanks to the Pottery Barns and Crate & Barrels and even Martha Stewart at Kmart, much of the public has become very sophisticated and more interested in original designs.”

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Sargent now has about 900 retail outlets, mainly specialty retailers and catalogs.

What small companies have going for them is flexibility, she says.

“Big companies have to reach the most people to keep their factories going,” Sargent said. “This affects the design. They might think that green and blue would be fun, but brown is what will sell the most, so they offer brown. We are small enough to do blue or green or purple and to constantly introduce new things.”

The home furnishings industry has a reputation for being an old-boys network, but both of these new companies are run by women.

“Women are the main consumers of furniture, but typically they aren’t the producers,” said marketing guru Tom Peters, who is married to Sargent.

“Companies marketing cars and financial services have profited by employing women to sell to women. The furniture industry is just beginning to talk about this,” said Peters, who accompanies his wife to High Point.

“In many cases, women getting into home furnishings are tuned into what other women are actually going to want,” Sargent said.

* Timbuktu products, (800) 524-1016.

* Susan Sargent products, (800) 245-4767.