So you didn’t come to Market? Here’s one reason why that may have been a mistake

You missed hearing Jackson/Catnapper’s plans for addressing booming demand

HIGH POINT— It’s no secret October Market was poorly attended.

Home News Now asked exhibitors about this both on the record and on background, and they were nearly unanimous in their reports. Sure, they expected attendance to be down, but, with a handful of exceptions, this was worse than they expected, far worse in some cases.

The High Point Market Authority confirmed attendance was 40% of what it was a year ago in terms of companies here and 35% in headcount vs. a year ago, based on badge scans. HPMA President and CEO Tom Conley said these figures reported to the board Monday aren’t final with two days of market left at the time. And he pointed out the comparison is to the best-attended market in a dozen years.

But given all of this, Jackson/Catnapper’s Anthony Teague, wasn’t going out on a limb when he told HNN that going into this market, he was thinking showroom traffic might be off a good 30% to 40%. Instead, it was down 65% to 70%, pretty much in line with HPMA’s estimate.

“Attendance was not what we had hoped,” the senior vice president of sales and merchandising said. And even though Premarket was robust with the Top 100 dealers, who mostly indicated they would not be coming back in October, Teague held out hope Jackson would see more of them — if for nothing else than to take another swing at negotiating for more product and more commitments and to see if anything had changed during this time of unprecedented supply disruption.

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“We thought that might be the case, but that has proven not to be the case,” he said last week. At the time of this interview, only two of Jackson’s top 25 dealers had been through.

To a certain degree, it’s understandable. Indeed, back in September, many Top 100 retailers indicated they were thinking of Premarket as the Market for various reasons. For starters, they weren’t sure the October Market would actually come to pass, considering the giant economic event for the state needed a nod of approval from a governor up for re-election and rightfully concerned about large gatherings. But there was also the safety concern from within the industry. Some Premarket buyers wanted to knock out their buying early and avoid flying back and the crowds in October. (As it turned out, they needn’t have worried about the latter.) 

While Teague said he gets this, he offered a counter-argument for why buyers should have reconsidered. A lot has changed in one month at Jackson/Catnapper. The company is tackling the pandemic and supply issues with a clear plan, he said. It wanted to tell dealers about it face-to-face, and it wanted to hear about their concerns and demands as well.

“We know from our own supply chain, the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” Teague  said. Jackson sits down with its own vendors as often as possible. These days, it’s constantly asking about lead times and lead-time changes. Is it on allocation? Is the price changing? Is demand changing? 

“Showing back up and pressing might have been beneficial to some bigger dealers,” he said. “But it is what it is. We’re happy to be here with the doors open, to greet people, to talk to them about our plans, because we do have concrete plans to talk about. 

“We have competitors who chose not to show; I don’t get that. We want to look our customers in the eye and tell them we have a plan.”

While it’s not the same as that face-to-face conversation, here’s at least part of that plan Jackson was sharing with dealers here. First, Teague said, it’s reached a point where the upholstery producer is now shipping double-digit percentages more product than it was before the pandemic hit. The labor shortage this industry and some others have been talking about? It hasn’t had that large of an impact on Jackson and its eight Southeastern plants.

“We were fortunate we were able to get our workforce back up and going quickly, and we expanded our workforce at all facilities,” Teague said. “We started a second shift in our Tennesse operations. We’re working overtime like there’s no tomorrow every day of the week. Three Saturdays a month, we’re asking our people to work full days. So we’re dedicating time, effort and money. And we do have new facility plans on the books, so we’re committed to expanding capacity.” (More on this to come.)

Teague said Jackson is viewing the unprecedented demand and current backlog more as an opportunity than just a temporary glut. 

“We wanted to be here to talk to the dealers, who showed up for Market, who are out at the store level every week,” he said. “They’re having to deal with the virus at retail. For us to use the virus as a reason not to be here or to say, ‘Hey, we’re sold out; we’ll see you in six months,’ that’s just not who we are.

“We’re in it for the long haul. We’re playing to win, trying to grow capacity over sales and give our customers the assurance that we’re not just waiting for business to cool off to take care of them. We have a plan.”

And while Teague didn’t want to criticize or suggest any one retailer should have come back to hear about this plan, “What I am saying is I’m surprised more of them didn’t come back just to have conversations with their vendor base since everything is so volatile — to say either ‘I want more capacity,’ or for reassurance that everything we said a month ago (is holding),” he said.

“Because right now, a month in this climate is an eternity.”

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