Star market
Celebrities take seats in the furniture industry
NEW YORK - Running off the field after each of his Super Bowl victories, Denver Bronco John Elway proclaimed for the camera that his next stop would be Disney World. A few days after reaching the ultimate pinnacle, the Pro Football Hall of Fame, in August, Elway had a different destination in mind: Times Square, to promote his new line of furniture.
John Elway, furniture guru? Hey, a guy's got to make a living. Why not do it in the furniture business? ''I feel like we have a great team,'' said Elway, who still communicates in football jargon, at a media event at Nasdaq in Times Square a couple of days later. ''I'm excited about taking the furniture industry by storm.''
The Elway Home Collection of TV cabinets, sofas, and reclining chairs, by Bassett, is being unveiled this week at the International Home Furnishings Market in High Point, N.C. Elway is one of many people with claims to fame, some stronger than others, who are lending their names – and perhaps their taste or expertise – to furniture manufacturers trying to stand out in crowded showrooms.
''The home industry is starting to look a lot like Hollywood,'' said Kathy Ireland, the former model. She's now CEO of Kathy Ireland Worldwide, her own brand of furniture, rugs, carpeting, and other home furnishings.
Suddenly, everyone's a furniture designer, weighing in on wood stains, opining on fabrics. Take best-selling author Frances Mayes, of "Under the Tuscan Sun" fame. In a new incarnation, she has teamed with Laneventure to create the "At Home in Tuscany" outdoor living collection, which is "based on the spirit of her book," said Gary McCray, Laneventure's vice president of marketing. "Our design team travelled to Tuscany and spent a couple of weeks there with Frances and toured the countryside and sketched and photographed and put our designers to work. They interpreted what they saw, in some cases literally."
High Point's furniture market is definitely the place for star-gazing this week. Oscar de la Renta, the celeb fashionista, will be there. (He designs furniture for Century.) So will jazz singer Steve Tyrell, rolling out his furniture collection, with Pennsylvania House, inspired "by memories of his Southern upbringing," a company spokesman said. So will Jaclyn Smith, the former Charlie's Angel, with her brand of French Country furniture, for Largo. And Cristina Saralegui, a Miami-based Spanish TV talk-show host, media mogul, and author of "My Life as a Blonde," who's created a collection of Spanish-influenced furniture with Pulaski.
Martha Stewart can't attend, due to other commitments, though she is introducing 41 pieces for Bernhardt, including a compact desk unit ironically called "Office in a Box."
But writer Nancy Lindemeyer will make an appearance here in this sleepy city near Greensboro, which comes to life twice a year during the largest home furnishings event in the world. Lindemeyer, founding editor of Victoria magazine, which folded last year, is promoting her "Intimate Home" furniture line with Hooker. "She's considered a lifestyle visionary," said Kim Shaver, a spokeswoman for Hooker, which in a separate collection has teamed with trend watcher Faith Popcorn. Popcorn's furniture theme is "cocooning," named for the lifestyle trend she identified in the early 1980s. "I thought it was a perfect way to exemplify a trend, through an actual product," Popcorn said in an interview.
It's not unusual, these days, to see celebrities crossing the aisle into unexpected venues. But why furniture, hardly the sexiest of products compared with, say, fashion? It seems reasonable for a fashion designer like Todd Oldham to switch genres and design furniture, as he has for
Which Elway freely acknowledged during an interview at the NASDAQ market site. "I don't design, I'm not the creative one. I know what I like," he said, though he added: "I'll have the final say."
Evidently, though, there is no shortage of celebrities out there looking to parlay their name or lifestyle into an eponymous furniture collection. "They call you every day," said John Moretz of Moretz Marketing in North Carolina, which, he said, "manages John Elway's lifestyle brands."
One furniture company, which asked not to be named, received a letter last month from a California company specializing in celebrity brand management. They were pitching their client -- Pamela Anderson -- as a potential furniture partner.
"As I'm sure you already know, her popularity worldwide is tremendous," the letter said of Anderson, the "Baywatch" actress who made headlines for her explicit homemade sex video, shot during her honeymoon with her husband Tommy Lee.
The letter continued: "The Pamela Anderson Collection was launched here in the United States at the Magic Show in Las Vegas last February . . . with an overwhelmingly positive response. . . . It is our goal to establish a solid relationship with a licensee who will handle the US and Canadian territories for furniture."
The furniture company declined the offer.
More often, though, furniture companies are accepting offers, or initiating them.
"There are not a lot of strong consumer brands in furniture," said Robert Spilman, president of Bassett. "A number of companies are looking to associate with known brands . . . to build a personality around their product and try to cut through the clutter of all the stuff out there."
"There is a lot of product parody in the business," agreed Ray Allegrezza, editor-in-chief of Furniture Today, a trade publication. "Everyone is looking for some excitement, a way -- in a sea of lookalike products -- to have a story to tell."
Latching on to celebrities is one way, at least, to increase the odds that retailers will venture into manufacturers' showrooms and open an account, to say nothing of starting a buzz about the collection.
In such a climate, the concept of "celebrity" is loosely defined -- and getting looser. Consider the recent arrival on the furniture scene of New York designer Celerie Kemble, who describes herself as being "very much part of the design world here, in the fashion scene." She is launching a furniture collection with Laneventure this week. "She's somewhat of a minor personality, a socialite," said Laneventure's McCray. "She's been featured in magazines, wearing various designer clothes."
For that matter, "it doesn't even have to be a live person," says Allegrezza, citing the Ernest Hemingway collections by Laneventure and Thomasville. "In fact, people will tell you, in the business, that it's better to go with a dead person than a live one because they can't get you into trouble. You-know-who [Stewart, just convicted of obstruction of justice in a stock sale] is not exactly good for Bernhardt."
Whether the celebrity strategy will work is an open question. "There are more failures than those that stick," Moretz acknowledges.
One New England designer is skeptical, though. "What's so pathetic is that there are good designers out there, or maybe anonymous people, who could have something to say," said Susan Sargent, a Vermont designer who sells her home furnishings on Newbury Street.
"But rather than saying they're going to put their commitment into really good-looking stuff, they focus more on marketing. And at the end of the day you go home with a Hemingway bed that looks exactly like a Tommy Bahama bed," she said.
Sargent, who has designed furniture for Lexington, has "been in that world" and is not impressed. "I still don't get it," she said. "I still don't get the people they select. I find it all pretty dull. I'd rather buy flea market furniture."
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
