Business: Furniture at Mart

Over the entrance of the 30-story American Furniture Mart Building on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive is a bas-relief of a woodman hacking a tree into logs, a sawyer cutting the logs into lumber, a carpenter fashioning the lumber into furniture. Under this symbolic device last week hurried thousands of furniture buyers from big stores and little throughout the land to attend the 21st semi-annual exhibition of the American Furniture Mart. Elderly, grey-thatched Wade McGowin, head buyer of Wanamaker’s, went from Manhattan, as did tall, dark-haired Mike Joseph of Gimbel Bros. and Charles S. Shaughnessy of R. H. Macy. From Sterling & Welch in Cleveland went short, heavy-set George Killius, known as one of the keenest buyers in the trade. In the largest collection of new furniture under one roof in the world they, and some 6,000 other buyers, joked and jostled over Mickey Mouse chairs, Biedermeier boudoirs, imitation Louis beds, functional sofas, juvenile hat racks, free wheeling beer carts.

Like the Toy Fair in Manhattan, the Furniture Mart is for manufacturers and buyers only. Spectators may not attend without passes. The Chicago mart is not the only furniture exhibit but it is the most important. A competing show at Marshall Field & Co.’s huge Merchandise Mart housed 53 exhibitors and Manhattan’s show which closed a fortnight ago was a huge success with 406. The Furniture Mart opened with 600. There the big retail stores select suites (pronounced “suits” by most of the trade) for display in the autumn, when the public does most of its furniture shopping. The professional buyers who last week smiled, frowned, scratched their heads, slapped feather mattresses and dusted armchairs with the seat of their pants may not actually close a deal for weeks or even months. But the Mart claims that 70% of all furniture purchased in the U. S. is bought from companies exhibiting at its winter and summer shows. This year manufacturers hope to tempt the public into renewed buying of modern furniture, which has toned down considerably since its introduction in 1928. Of the 20,000 pieces on exhibit at the mart, 26% were modern “functional” (extreme) and “classic” (toned down), 30% Early American, 23% commercial and nondescript, 10% Georgian, the rest Louis, Early English, Empire and Biedermeier.

Biggest exhibitor at the Chicago Mart is also the titular head of U. S. furniture companies. Kroehler Manufacturing Co. of Naperville, Ill. claims the distinction of being the world’s largest maker of upholstered furniture. Grey-haired, pock-marked Peter who always attends every show in person, was a $27-a-month bookkeeper when he started to work with a lounge company in Naperville. He bought the lounge company, built up a furniture corporation which in 1929 did $20,000,000 worth of business. His customers today include such heavy buyers as Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward.

Grand Rapids’ most famed furniture man, Robert W. Irwin, chairman of the Furniture Code Authority and president of Robert W. Irwin Co., had no exhibits at the Chicago Mart. Buyers could roam its 16 floors without seeing a single stick of Grand Rapids furniture. Grand Rapids held a show of its own last week sponsored by an association of which Mr. Irwin was president for ten years. In recent years Chicago has surpassed Grand Rapids as a distributing centre and manufacturer of upholstered furniture.

Furniture is one of the first things people stop buying when Depression comes, one of the last they begin to buy again when it goes. Even before Depression, a 50% increase in the number of apartment dwellers reduced the demand for furniture in millions of families to little more than a few sticks. Meantime manufacturers piled up inventories of distress furniture, which led to inevitable price cutting and the ruin of 1,000 manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers in a single year (1932). The manufacturing industry managed to right itself last year, has been running on a fairly even price keel since last summer when business booked by wholesalers increased 100% over 1932, and prices on some lines went up as much as 60%. The Furniture Code, which went into effect last December, helped stabilize prices by forbidding sales below cost. But the boom of last summer and autumn has died away, and the seasonal upswing stimulated by June weddings has been weaker this year than last. A tremor ran through the industry fortnight ago on reports from Chicago, hastily denied, that some manufacturers were about to cut prices.