Contemporary Conqueror

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Retailer captures furniture frontier 

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By Celene Adams

 

As a child in Copenhagen, Denmark, Benny Kjaer, now owner of Albuquerque's TEMA Contemporary Furniture, read about Davy Crockett, the great legend of the American frontier.

"Ever since then, I wanted to come to America. I wanted to come where the Indians and cowboys were," he recalls in his still-thick Danish accent.

So, Kjaer, after training with a Danish furniture company in Denver, traveled to New Mexico in the late 1970s to start TEMA. New Mexico was closest to the Denver store, enabling easier distribution, Kjaer says, explaining why he chose this state.

But Kjaer hadn't counted on having to educate the natives about what contemporary furniture is. For he soon discovered that the simple lines of the Scandinavian designers, so prevalent now across the U.S., weren't well known in New Mexico.

"There was one contemporary store in town, so it was not totally unknown. But I had to show people how it went with Southwestern homes," he says.

"It's almost like a contrast, 'cause you have the ... vigas and the beams and the soft walls and adobe. And then, in contemporary furniture, particularly in Scandinavia, we use a lot of natural woods. We tend to have relatively soft lines, soft edges. It goes very well together," he says. The upholstery, too, blends well, Kjaer adds, because European designers use primarily natural colors.

Kjaer built an adobe wall in his then Menaul Boulevard store and put in tile floors to illustrate how his furniture complements traditional New Mexico architecture. And he took photographs of customers' contemporary decor and hung them in the store to strengthen his point.

Although he did have a limited advertising budget, Kjaer mostly spread the word by explaining just how compatible his furniture is with Southwestern homes to "whoever walked in the door" of his store -- a store he'd started with $1,000. "I was the typical immigrant. [That was] the amount I arrived with, not including my two suitcases," he laughs.

Kjaer might have started small. But by his second year in business he turned a "little" profit. And today he says he has "thousands" of "sophisticated" clients and his two New Mexico locations gross around $10 million.

"We are the largest contemporary furniture sellers in New Mexico," he says.

The New Mexico market has become more global over the years. "There are many people moving here from other places [and] people have more money these days. We're also seeing a lot more people moving here [and] building houses that might just as well sit in Atlanta or California or anywhere else in the country."

Having come from large, diverse markets, the newcomers are more familiar with contemporary furniture, he says. And because they aren't necessarily building in the Southwestern style, New Mexico is no longer entirely dissimilar from other markets in the country, thus broadening TEMA's market.

People also are far more educated today about contemporary furniture because of stores such as IKEA, which has made the style mainstream, Kjaer says. As a result, within the last couple of years especially, there's been a surge of interest, such that even more traditional furniture stores often carry certain contemporary lines.

Kjaer says this does more to publicize his business than to compete with it because there are still many people who aren't familiar with contemporary. "They don't really know what [it] is. Or they have a misconception -- that it's harsh steel and glass."

IKEA, for example, which does not have a New Mexico location, has "helped us more than anything," says Kjaer, adding that he admires the Scandinavian superstore tremendously.

IKEA, however, he says, has a different market than TEMA's, generally selling less expensive furniture.

Kjaer, on the other hand, doesn't worry about being the cheapest. "Cheap and quality hardly ever go together," he says.

That doesn't mean, however, that all of TEMA's merchandise is expensive. While the store makes a point of targeting upper income customers, and while some of its exclusive leather sofas sell for as much as $7,000, TEMA has a "good/better/best" marketing strategy. "Like typical retail, we tend to have ... a little bit at the bottom, a little bit at the top and most ... in the broad middle," he says.

That middle is broad not only in terms of price but also in terms of selection. TEMA began with two divisions -- office and home furniture but, over the years, it has expanded its collection in each and has added new divisions.

For instance, instead of only selling commercial office furniture, as it once did, the store has also moved into stocking furniture for the home office. "The landscape of office furniture is changing. Desks have become fine furnishings," says Mia Maes, TEMA's marketing director.

TEMA also has, within the last two years, added a gallery of Italian furnishings, a bedding gallery and a "youth" gallery -- a line called "EQ3," which is designed to appeal to kids, students and first-time homeowners.

Each of the recent inventory additions was introduced due to either customer or manufacturer initiative. While the company doesn't regularly do formal market research, customers make their needs known, Kjaer says. "Often, demand becomes apparent when customers request special order items that aren't in the showroom." The Italian gallery, for example, "was a typical example of where there was a pull from the marketplace ... There was more and more demand."

Because there are also price, delivery and design advantages manufacturers give retailers to create such galleries, Kjaer created a collection of four Italian-made furniture lines. "The Italians are incredibly good with leather furniture, but the problem's always been delivery time. There's no good way of getting it fast. So today, we have ... two domestic and two import lines," he says. This enables customers either to order a custom-designed sofa from Italy, for which there is still a several month wait, or to buy an immediately available, domestically made Italian sofa.

The EQ3, or "youth," line, on the other hand, was generated less by market demand than by the manufacturer, Kjaer says. TEMA collaborates with the manufacturer by stocking collections of furniture rather than individual pieces. Consequently, instead of trying to combine items from different places, they either arrive already packaged into suites of complementary pieces, or TEMA can package them.

Packaging items is one strategy TEMA uses to boost sales-- especially in departments such as bedding. Bedding is more difficult to sell because of competition from large department stores, Kjaer says. "[It's] a line of merchandise that's not 'style specific.' It's not a contemporary furniture customer coming in and buying bedding."

He tries to get an edge in this area by offering "alternative" products, such as Memory Foam and Latex, which, unlike traditional springs, use body heat to shape to your body, providing extra support.

However, the main attraction of buying bedding at TEMA, Kjaer says, is that the store helps put packages together -- a mattress with a contemporary bed frame for example. It's a strategy that's similar to keeping necessities at the back of the grocery store, he says. "We will lead you through the store [back to bedding] and try to at least show you, or introduce you, to some of the other things we do."

Showing people what TEMA does became a whole lot easier when, last March, the ABC hit show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" invited the store to provide furnishings for a family in St. James, N.Y.

The show featured TEMA in back-to-back episodes aired in mid-May. The two programs, combined, reached close to 18 million viewers, says Maes.

Developing a Web site a decade ago has also helped publicize the store. At the time, no one knew the 'Net's potential, Kjaer recalls, but "Darn it if people didn't start calling and asking if they could buy from us ... Then, a few years ago, we said, 'maybe we need to take this a little more seriously' and we actually made it a separate profit center."

Today, 10 to 15 percent of TEMA's business comes via cross-country orders through its Web site.

But there are some ventures Kjaer's tried that haven't worked.

"I've made almost every mistake in the book," he admits. "Some years ago, we opened a store in Coronado Center. We thought it'd be a good idea, lots of people. Well, selling furniture in a mall didn't work so well." It seems the mall has lots of traffic, but most of it is teenagers.

There also was his attempt to marry the selling of entertainment furniture with electronics. "That was when the big screen TVs came out. Many of these things are really not that pretty by themselves so lots of people say they want to put entertainment centers around them. ... The only problem was, that's not how people think at all. They go to buy a TV and [later] they start thinking about the furniture to put around it. And, besides, what do we know about electronics?"

And then there was the choice of Albuquerque itself as a business location. The economy here is sometimes a little "fickle," Kjaer says. If he had it to do over again, he says, he would have kept his New Mexico locations smaller and expanded elsewhere.

But then he wouldn't be king of the New Mexico contemporary furniture frontier.