by MARTINSVILLE, Va – With news that Hooker Furnishings has entered the outdoor category with the purchase of Sunset West, Casual News Now reached out to the two companies to get more information on why Hooker chose Sunset West, what this means for both companies and what’s in store for the future.
Hooker has been looking at the category for a while, Chief Marketing Officer Johne Albanese tells Casual News Now, and they weren’t certain of whether they wanted to go down the path of organic development or acquisition.
“When we heard about Sunset West, we were really excited about Wes Stewart himself, who’s a great guy and a very strong cultural fit with us,” Albanese says. “He’s the right kind of person—very knowledgeable about the industry, merchandising and design. And we like the fact that their price point strata aligned really well with Hooker’s legacy brands. They really fit in with who Hooker is, and we thought that was really important as well.”
The company also chose to acquire an outdoor brand because it wanted to accelerate into the category.
“To develop product on our own was not out of the question, the biggest issue was time,” Albanese says. “It would take a pretty good while for us to build up a brand starting from scratch. We felt that this moved us along faster and helped us to provide a category to a lot of our customers that need outdoor.”
Stewart adds that when Hooker came to see Sunset West at Las Vegas Market last August, they identified with and understood Sunset West’s curated use of mixed materials and colors.
“That’s exactly how they approach their furniture, so they identified how we approached the outdoor space and gravitated toward it because it mirrors what they do on the inside,” Stewart says. “Outdoor living is an aspirational part of the house now, the entertaining space isn’t your living room, it’s the space that flows in and out of your house. They’re looking at outdoor not as outdoor, but just as furniture. So this makes all the sense in the world for them.”
Stewart also says Sunset West can take some of Hooker’s design cues and mimic that in what they do, which would “provide synergy of product from the indoor to the outdoor entertaining space,” he says.
Going forward, Albanese says that Sunset West will continue to run as a unique enterprise supported with the resources of Hooker Furnishings—whether that be distribution of resources, warehousing resources or supply-side resources.
The first step, according to Stewart, is that Sunset West will populate Hooker’s 800,000-square-foot Savanna, Ga. warehouse with stock items, giving Sunset West access to the eastern seaboard.
Then, Hooker will open a new High Point showroom in April 2023 and Sunset West will have space to display its outdoor products. This timing gives the companies time to figure out the nuts and bolts of logistics out of Savannah so they can be ready to go in 2023, Stewart says.
“By passing those resources on to Sunset West, we can give them an opportunity to accelerate their own growth,” Albanese says. “And that’s really going to be our focus, supporting them.
