F/T offering demographic analytical tools
By Furniture Today Staff -- Furniture Today, January 19, 2004
HIGH POINT — Furniture/Today is launching a pair of powerful new research products to serve the industry.
The first, available through a link on the Web site www.furnituretoday.com, allows users free access to easy-to-use but detailed demographic reports on their trading areas.
Information is available on consumer characteristics such as household income, age, race and ethnicity. The information can be mapped to show the frequency around a given location, a valuable tool for retailers who want to analyze their markets. Data are available by state, city and county, and also by TV markets and ZIP codes.
For those who want information on furniture sales potential by product, a second product is a new software program called The Right Site, FT Edition, now available for sale. Information is available in the Research section of the Web site.
The result of a collaboration with New York-based Easy Analytic Software, Right Site combines detailed and accurate data from Furniture/Today's third large-scale survey of consumer households with Entry Analytic's extensive demographic database. It provides sales potential figures for 26 furniture and home furnishings categories for 2003 and forecasts for 2008. Data are available at various geographic levels, from the national to ZIP code.
In announcing the new software, Ray Allegrezza, Furniture/ Today's editor-in-chief, said, "Making this full-featured software with furniture-specific data available continues F/T's tradition of being the leader in supplying information to the furniture industry."
For years, he said, Furniture/ Today has provided detailed demographic information about consumers who buy home furnishings, based on consumer surveys. The most recent, conducted in December 2002 and January 2003, was answered by 31,505 households.
"In this new initiative, we combined that furniture-specific data with the extensive demographic information compiled by Easy Analytic Software to provide the industry with an easy-to-use tool that can be customized to individual company's product assortment and geographic reach," Allegrezza said.
Robert Katz, founder and president of Easy Analytic, said the company's software is designed to perform a variety of sales and marketing analyses. "Users can make informed decisions about existing or new store evaluation, as well as sales analysis, market potential and direct-mail analysis."
Furniture/Today chose Easy Analytic based on the company's extensive background in modeling sales potential forecasts.
