Creating a gateway for growth
By Furniture Today Staff -- Furniture Today, April 28, 2003
Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. — All three owners of Off Main Furniture hail from Fort Worth, Texas-based Pier 1 Imports, where they had lengthy careers through 1999.
Gerald Tidwell was with the Top 100 company the longest — 21 years — most recently as director of international visual merchandising, responsible for store design and the visual direction for all of Pier 1's international operations.
Laura Valdes was a zone visual merchandising manager and was involved in operations and training for more than 200 U.S. and 32 Canadian stores.
Albert Valdes, now 38, was Pier 1's youngest executive, a vice president of international development responsible for planning and budgeting for international operations. He also led the company's e-commerce initiative and from 1996 to 1999 was on a team investigating small acquisition opportunities.
Valdes said he saw the opportunity to put something together from the ground up in specialty furniture, which led to Off Main.
"What we found out was with typical small retailers, with five to seven locations, the key to success was usually an individual, and typically it was the merchant," he said. The smaller operations had very little structure, he added, and there was usually at least one key operational aspect missing. Operating support systems were often weak.
When Valdes and his partners went to work on Off Main, they decided that establishing the support for future growth from the start was critical. They invested in a Storis retail management system that could support a 50-store operation.
"That is truly the gateway to (growth)," he said. "In essence what that gave us was an enterprise resource planning package, an all-encompassing system for merchandising as well as inventory control, accounts payable and point-of-sale order entry."
