After Vadodara Central that recently started its operations in Vadodara, Future Group rolls out their ‘value for money’ furniture retailing store — Furniture Bazaar.

It also plans to have another six such outlets in the coming year for Gujarat and over 60 outlets in India. The store was launched in M Cube Mall at Jetalpur Road on Saturday.

Spread over 7,000 square feet of area, the specially designed store will offer a variety of furniture at affordable price range. While the outlet has 40 per cent Indian furniture on display, the rest has been sourced from Sri Lanka, Malaysia and European countries. Read more »

Holz Haus, the Amish furniture store in Plaza 41, is expanding.

The store opened in the renovated Randall Foods building about a year ago.

Now, they’ll be adding about 10,000 square feet to the building that will allow the owners to add a mattress line and offer office furniture. The store presently is 17,000 square feet.

Added to the store’s offerings will be a mattress line called Platinum Dreams, a division of Claire Bedding, said Chuck Vockler, an owner of the family-run business. Read more »

Gulf and Middle East consumers using designs produced in Pakistan are potential buyers of Pakistani furniture and could facilitate the industry to achieve the targeted $1 billion export by 2015.

These remarks were made by Chairman Furniture Pakistan Shahbaz Aslam, while speaking at a press conference held at the Federation of Pakistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FPCCI) zonal office Saturday.

He said local furniture industry is growing at an annual rate of 25 percent annually in the absence of modern technology and skilled labour force. Read more »

Household pets love leather furniture, but you don’t have to live with cat scratches or dog bites anymore.

The Leather Restoration Co. can not only remove pets’ calling cards, but also dye the furniture.

”We can take the worst piece and make it look new again,” says Harris L. Lansky, founder and owner of LRC Services in Miami Shores. “Used to be that if you bought a $2,000 leather chair and got a spot of ink on it, it would take a couple of years for the ink to fade. Not anymore.”

Lansky had been in the furniture business 40 years, mostly as a manufacturer’s representative and consultant, when he discovered a company in New York that restored leather furniture. He thought there would be a good market for such a company in South Florida. Read more »

What happened the last time you walked into a store intending to buy furniture? Did you make a purchase? Or did you leave discouraged?

A recent survey of 2,500 households for the trade journal Furniture/Today estimated that $47.5 billion was lost last year because consumers didn’t find what they wanted when they shopped for new furniture. The biggest percentages of nonpurchases were for futons (50 percent), motion sofas (43 percent), curio cabinets (42 percent) and dining room sets (40 percent.)

Think price is the obstacle? Not always. Industry pros say the furniture-shopping experience is far more complex, a combination of emotional and merchandising experiences. Read more »

Mad About Furniture are specialists in Furniture Packages & Furniture in Spain and have now launched a new Affiliate program for Estate Agents and Rental Agents based in Spain and the UK.

”Our website has been online since 2001 and we have always tried to stay up to speed with the latest trends and technologies when it comes to online marketing. We have recently updated our website and decided that it was time to expand our marketing activities.”

“We already have partners in the real estate business here in Spain who refer their clients in person so it made perfect sense for these current partners and new partners to utilise their website traffic. All they have to do is sign up to the affiliate program and once approved they will have access to a verity of banners and links that they can put on their website. Then every time one of their website visitors clicks on a banner and makes a purchase the agent will get a commission – its as easy as that!” said David, MD of Mad About Furniture S.L. Read more »

There are good office chairs and bad office chairs. Badly designed chairs are bad for backs, and over long periods of time can permanently damage the spine.

Bad chairs can also lead to aching arms, shoulders, and legs and can reduce the circulation of the blood. Unstable chairs can cause accidents and injuries.

Obviously such chairs do not fulfill the employer’s obligation under Occupational Health and Safety law to provide a safe workplace.

SK Office Furniture chairs are properly designed by its design team. They take into account ergonomics, strength and stability as well as the aesthetic requirements of the user and the relevant chair standards.

SK Office Furniture chairs are shaped to accommodate the natural shape of the back so you sit comfortably, with sufficient lumbar support. Read more »

The couch is frayed from hosting one too many burly football fans. The dining-room chairs are covered in fabric that was hip back when people still used that word. Realizing it’s time for a furniture facelift isn’t always easy, says Kaja Gam of Kaja Gam Design in Ossining.

“Most of us can’t see that,” Gam says. “We get used to something. We don’t see things get tired.”

But they do -and that’s when reupholstery can provide a stylish alternative to buying new.

Sometimes it even encourages people to buy old. Read more »

When Jennifer Selby Long relocated from an office with leased furniture to an unfurnished one in February, her decorating problems began.

After shopping at different stores, all that the 43-year-old San Francisco resident could find was furniture made with a “5-foot-10-inch man in mind.” Long, who is 5′6″, ended up doing a lot of improvising, buying bookcases from Crate & Barrel and inheriting a reddish-gold wood desk from the last office tenant.

“Everything is too masculine, edgy, too modern, and heavy on the metal,” said Long, who runs a management consulting business.

With female-owned small businesses growing almost twice as fast as all small business nationwide, retailers—from Swedish furniture store Ikea to OfficeMax Inc.—are starting to wake up to the demands of female entrepreneurs like Long.

These include office chairs and desks scaled to women’s smaller frames, as well as furniture that has more storage to hold purses and other personal items—a top priority for women. Read more »

World furniture trade amounts to about US$ 90 billion. The degree of market openness is continuously increasing across the globe, from East to West. New furniture production bases are gaining ground and the overall scenario is changing fast.

China is a leading player on the global furniture market, having produced more than US$ 50 billion of furniture in the year 2006 of which about one third reaches foreign markets. Furniture production which recorded two digit annual growth in the last decade, far exceeded the country’s average industrial growth rate over the same period. Among the strong points the low cost of labour, the ability to attract investments, the relative row material abundance and the future development of domestic demand.

Among the weakness of the Chinese furniture industry two issues stand out: low labour productivity and the high dependency on imported raw materials. This last factor makes the Chinese furniture industry particularly vulnerable to variations in international trade prices and is bound to gradually erode the other traditional competitive advantages such as low labour costs. Read more »