‘Made in USA’ means little to furniture buyers

updated 3:09 p.m. ET Feb. 10, 2006

LEXINGTON, N.C. - Bob Stec works in a company town. A furniture town. A town so tightly tied to the business of making tables and chairs and sofas and beds that they share the same name.

But Bob Stec is an importer.

That’s the only way he believes Lexington Home Brands, the privately held company he heads, is able to survive. And despite the stigma attached to job offshoring and the negative publicity of Stec’s decision to close more than a dozen plants and lay off thousands of workers since 1999, his company is a success.

“When the Titanic goes down, you try to save as many people as you can,” Stec said. “We used to be a 100 percent domestic producer and we were a financial disaster. Now we are importing and I’d put our financial health up against anyone.”

Stec was at the center of a recent spat with North Carolina artist Bob Timberlake, a pioneer in celebrity-branded furniture who has long insisted his signature collection of traditional furniture be made in America. But while keeping a “Made in the USA” tag on his furniture is important to Timberlake and a few others, it’s all but impossible today to furnish a home without buying something made overseas.

And consumers, according to analysts, retailers and industry executives, don’t much care.

“All they care about is the price and quality,” said Lin Brown, the manager of a Furniture Express store in Sterling Heights, Mich. “It’s not an issue at all.”

A decade ago, imports made up less than a third of all-wood furniture sales in the U.S. They are now at about 55 percent, and industry analyst Jerry Epperson predicts they will rise again this year to nearly two-thirds of all-wood furniture sales. Last year, about 75 percent of all furniture sold in the U.S. was produced overseas.

It’s in the context of that evolving marketplace that Stec has tried to persuade Timberlake to allow Lexington to produce his signature furniture collection overseas.

Timberlake, who lives in Lexington, has long identified with the workers who once filled the city’s furniture plants and criticized companies that have moved production overseas. Since 2000, the industry has shed more than 20,000 jobs — over 27 percent of total employment — in North Carolina alone, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

While Timberlake has allowed some of the newer, lower-priced furniture that bears his name to be made overseas, he has insisted his original line be made exclusively in America.

Lexington sold about $70 million worth of Timberlake-brand furniture in 2002, the most recent year for which sales figures were available. Sun Capital Partners Inc., which bought the company in 2002, does not disclose sales results. But the company shut down production in December, and when it resumes, Stec said it’s unlikely to be in Lexington.

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