by Luxury furniture manufacturer is looking at properties in the Hamilton design district, where it plans to move by the fall 2025 market
HIGH POINT — Luxury case goods and upholstery manufacturer EJ Victor is putting the showroom building it has occupied for the past 34 years on the market this week with plans to move to another space in town.
Senior management told Home News Now that the company is starting to look at properties in the Hamilton district, which typically draws a large amount of traffic from designers and retailers in the market for upper-end furnishings.
The company has occupied its building at 116 S. Lindsay St. since 1990, according to John Jokinen, a founder and longtime executive and stakeholder in the business. He said the building was initially about 6,000 square feet, but over the years expanded to its current footprint of about 23,000 square feet.
The building, which the company has owned for many years, is synonymous with EJ Victor and its collections from designers around the world. Each room within the space has become a destination for licensed collections by Randall Tysinger, Allison Paladino, Jack Fhillips, Alfredo Paredes and Bethan Gray Shamsian, among others, including its former Ralph Lauren line.
But as a destination, the showroom can be a challenge to get to, particularly during inclement weather as seen over the past couple of days. CEO Richard Oliver said it is about half a mile from the Hamilton district, where many other luxury brands have a cluster of established showrooms.
Oliver told Home News Now that moving forward, the company seeks to better engage with the designer community. Thus, having a showroom in the heart of the design district will help accomplish that goal, notably with additional traffic.
But he said that the company is not just looking for any space. Instead, it wants to re-create the experience visitors have had over the many years they’ve come to EJ Victor.
“I want to keep that experience,” he said, adding that the company also wants to do a better job telling the story of its capabilities as a domestic manufacturer.
“I want to be able to show some of the things that we can do and maybe have a whole area devoted to communicating who we are,” he added. “As we go into a new space, we are going to get new traffic and that new traffic will be able to see what we are about and the kind of capabilities that we have.”
He added that the space also may be slightly smaller in the range of 16,000 to 17,000 square feet.
“If it’s the right design, we can do what we do here, but in a smaller footprint,” he said, noting that the current space has a couple of more rooms than it needs for the brands it carries.
The timeline of its move will depend on how quickly it finds a new space that suits its needs. However, the plan is to sell the property to an investor then lease back the space for at least a year, perhaps more, before it relocates as early as the summer of 2025.
Ultimately, the move will help the company grow its business with new and existing customers alike that shop an area of the market that Oliver said draws more traffic than its current location.
“There are enough statistics where we can categorize the profile of who our customers are and who our potential customers are,” said Oliver, who came on board as CEO last June. “And you know they didn’t hire me to keep the company the same size. They hired me to try to grow the company. This is such an important event twice a year, and we need to be in an environment where we are getting more exposure.”
Stump & Company, of Charlotte, North Carolina, is representing EJ Victor in the marketing of the showroom building.
