The furniture builders in New England are a tight group. We keep in contact with one another directly and we use the same suppliers and shippers, so we know how everyone is making out. It’s pretty tight out there right now. A lot of very talented furniture makers are struggling to stay busy. It’s hard to see. These people are our friends.
Knowing what’s going on in the marketplace, seeing and hearing about it every day, we feel very fortunate that our shop has enough work. We know how lucky we are. Our shop is busy. We have enough work to keep busy right through mid-summer. We attribute this continuing flow of work to two things: a diversified clientele and strong relationships with our customers.
About 3 years ago, we decided to make a concerted effort to strengthen our presence in the non-residential market: libraries, colleges and universities. We had been selling to this market for years, but we really hadn’t put too much effort into growing that part of the business. Our focus was primarily residential furniture and all of our marketing efforts were directed there. The institutional work was coming in, but mostly by word of mouth. We have worked hard in recent years to reach out to this market. We’ve added to our marketing significantly and it’s paying off for us.
Huston & Company is currently building furniture for some heavy-hitting clients, such as Princeton University, UPENN, Harvard Business School and public libraries in New England and even as far as Kansas. Most of these projects were put into motion one, two, even three years ago. We are always looking ahead in this market, because that’s how it moves. Our biggest question now is how this crazy economy will affect our business a year from now, or in two years.
Our residential sales have definitely slowed down. Right now, less than half of the orders we have are residential. Most of them are from existing customers. Many of them are fairly small orders; we’re finding our customers are still ordering, but they’re getting one piece at a time, instead of multiple pieces. They’ve worked with us before, so they know that their money will be well spent. We nurture our relationships with our clients; they often become our friends. We think this is the key to why they come back, even in tough times like these.
We admit we would be struggling now if it weren’t for the increase in the institutional orders in recent years. If we were still focused on residential orders as our primary income, we’d be dog-paddling right now. And who knows, next year or the year after, colleges and universities may not have had time to refill their coffers from this downturn. But by then, maybe the outlook will be better for our residential clients, and that business will pick up again.
In the meantime, we are not planning to decrease our marketing efforts at all. In fact, we may even add to them this year. We don’t think now is the time to ‘hide under the table’. We want to be the first furniture maker people think of when they are feeling better about the economy and the state of things. The recession won’t last forever, and we’ll be here when our clients are ready.
We wish all of our friends, colleagues and competitors a healthy spring and summer, and good growth and success.
Here are a few pictures I took today.
Residential Home-Office desk for a new client. This was built by Charlie. It's gorgeous. We love it and we know our client will too!
These are table bases for the Maine Historical Society. This is part of a larger order. We are excited about this project and to see the new Library at the Historical Society now that the renovation is nearly complete.
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