Furniture Store Business Plan, Marketing Plan, How To Guide, and Funding Directory
The Furniture Store Business Plan and Business Development toolkit features 18 different documents that you can use for capital raising or general business planning purposes. Our product line also features comprehensive information regarding to how to start a Furniture Store business. All business planning packages come with easy-to-use instructions so that you can reduce the time needed to create a professional business plan and presentation.
Your Business Planning Package will be available for download after your purchase.
- Bank/Investor Ready!
- Complete Industry Research
- 3 Year Excel Financial Model
- Business Plan (26 to 30 pages)
- Loan Amortization and ROI Tools
- Three SWOT Analysis Templates
- Easy to Use Instructions
- All Documents Delivered in Word, Excel, and PDF Format
- Meets SBA Requirements
Furniture can be found in every office, home, any of it in any other place where people need to sit down. It is a product that is in continued demand among people at all times. As such, most furniture stores are generally able to remain profitable and cash flow positive in most economic environments. One of the nice things that owning and operating a furniture store is that these businesses are not subject to the same level of competition from online vendors. This is primarily due to the fact that these businesses have customers that want to come into their stores and try out the furniture before they make a purchase. Additionally, many of these businesses offer specific types of financing given that the acquisition of furniture is a big ticket item.
Most online retailers do not have specific e-commerce functionality that allows customers to directly finance their purchases. Almost all e-commerce retailers require that a customer use a credit card rather than in-store or third-party financing for their purchases. This provides most furniture stores with a strong competitive advantage over entities operate solely in an e-commerce base capacity. Of course, it is very important that a furniture store maintain an online presence especially among people that have gone into the store and will then make a purchase at a later date from the company through the online platform.
The startup cost associated with the new furniture store typically range anywhere from $100,000 all the way to about $2 million depending on the location and the size of the show room that will be developed. However, it should be noted that some of these businesses may actually have much higher startup cost especially if the owners going to purchase inventory outright from manufacturers and wholesalers. One of the common trends these days among furniture stores is to support local artisans produce furniture by selling their products on a consignment basis.
A furniture store SWOT analysis should be produced as well. As relates to strengths, furniture stores generate moderately high gross margins from sales – usually in the 50% to 80% range – and they are able to produce their revenues in most economic climates. The barriers to entry are concerted moderately high given the size of showrooms required in order to operate this type of business.
For weaknesses, these businesses do have very high operating expenses given that they must acquire large inventories while concurrently having a large sales staff. Showrooms are also expensive to operate for rent and utility standpoint.
For opportunities, furniture stores can simply expand by establishing additional locations while concurrently sourcing new inventories from different manufacturers and wholesalers. Again, one of the other ways of furniture stores can readily expand is by maintaining expansive e-commerce platform allows these businesses to divest inventories from anywhere in the country.
As it pertains to threats, these businesses will continue to have issues as it relates to working with e-commerce competitors. However, most people do want to test out furniture before they make a purchase so this risk is somewhat limited.
A furniture store business plan should be developed if the entrepreneur is going to be acquiring financing for the development of this business. As with all business planning documents this should feature a three-year profit and loss statement, cash analysis, balance sheet, breakeven analysis, and business ratios page. As it relates to the industry research portion of the business plan, the furniture store industry generates $70 billion revenue per year among 40,000 businesses. The industry employs 240,000 people.
It is very important within the business plan, especially if bank financing is being sought, to have an overview of the collateral that is going to be used in conjunction with a business loan. This includes taking a look at all the inventory that we purchased as well as any showroom real estate will be acquired as part of the overall operations of the business.
A demographic analysis showcasing the median household income, average annual expenditure on furniture, population size, population density, and other relevant information should be included as well. These demographic analysis are typically used in conjunction with the development of a marketing plan. Finally, a competitive analysis should also be included given the fact that most suburban and urban markets have a number of furniture stores that are in competition with one another. It is important to showcase what differentiating factor is stores will have against the development.
A furniture store marketing plan also needs to be developed in order to showcase the furniture appropriately to the general public. Most importantly, and expansive traditional marketing plan should be implemented that focuses on flyers, mailers, and distribution catalogs within the local and regional market. This is an expensive way of marketing, but this is really the best way in order to drive people to a new furniture store. Most importantly, these flyers should contain discount offers on specialized furniture especially inventories have been slow to move. Additionally, an online presence is absolutely necessary for a furniture store given that most people now find local and specialized regional businesses through online sales portals. This website should relist among all major search engines and a search engine optimization firm should be hired in order to ensure that the business can be found quickly among Google, Bing, and Yahoo users. The website should feature the entire inventory of the business coupled with e-commerce functionality that allows anyone to purchase any of the products that is held in the company’s inventories.
Furniture stores are going to continue to be one of the mainstay industries within the United States given that is a necessity for almost all homeowners and business owners. People are always going to want to upgrade their furniture from time to time, and these businesses are able to generate moderately high gross margins from these big ticket sales. There’s really nothing regarding automation or ongoing e-commerce competition that would drastically impact the way that these companies conduct their business operations.