As industry struggles, Furniture Brands International expands licensing

Furniture Brands International Inc., the Clayton-based importer and manufacturer, is expanding its licensing program beyond the current Thomasville platform to include several other of its main brands, including Lane, Broyhill, Drexel Heritage and Henredon.

As the furniture industry slogs through a major slump, Furniture Brands is working to pull more furniture buyers into stores and attract them to non-furniture offerings bearing the names of its brands. The Thomasville brand has already expanded beyond home furniture into residential flooring, lighting and kitchen cabinets.

“A robust licensing program will focus on leveraging the power of our market-leading brands into new and adjacent home furnishings categories,” said Ralph Scozzafava, the company’s chairman and chief executive. ”This increases consumer awareness for our core furniture offerings and creates an additional income stream that provides a tangible return on our brand equity,” he said in a statement.

The industry is in a tangible slide because of falling home sales and shrinking consumer confidence.

New orders of residential furniture were down 11 percent in March and down 8 percent in the first quarter of the year. The first three quarters of the year represented a 12 percent drop from the same period two years ago, according to a survey of manufacturers and distributors by Smith Leonard PLLC, a consulting firm based in High Point, N.C.

More than four in five survey respondents reported lower orders in March compared to the same month in 2007.

“The results for March continued to reflect poor performance for most in the industry,” wrote Ken Smith, managing partner of Smith Leonard. “We do hear about a few good days and sometimes even a good week, but there does not appear enough traction to see any sort of rebound.”

Hopes that the industry might be at least “somewhat flat” in 2008 have not come true, he wrote in a monthly newsletter. “It’s just time to hunker down and hold on.”