Connecticut-based Lovesac benefits from furniture boom during pandemic
STAMFORD — Millions of Americans are spending much more time at home due to the coronavirus crisis — and many are willing to spend to upgrade their interior space.
The rise of at-home working and learning has contributed to a surge in demand for furniture, with
Stamford-based Lovesac ranking as one of the biggest beneficiaries. Its sales have spiked in recent months, with online business driving the increases. Now, the company is looking to turn that momentum into longterm growth to become an industry powerhouse.
“A simple way to put it is everything worked,” Lovesac founder and CEO Shawn
Nelson said in an interview. “We had a number of tactics — from discounts, to introduction of new products, to merchandising efforts — that all went really well and delivered results that we’re really proud of.”
In the wake of factory shutdowns in China and Vietnam, many home-furnishing firms have scrambled to build up inventory.
Furniture retailers saw their sales for Nov. 27 to Nov. 30 — from Black Friday to Cyber Monday — grow an average of 30 percent year over year, according to a survey conducted by the Home Furnishings Association and investment bank and institutional-securities firm Piper Sandler.
“There was such pent-up
too quickly and it cuts rates to give the economy a boost if the jobless rate is too high.
Fed Chair Janet Yellen, who has been tapped by President-elect Joe Biden to be Treasury secretary, said at the time in arguing for the small initial rate hike that inflation had been held down in 2015 by a sharp drop in oil prices which had kept the Fed’s inflation target running below 0.5 percent. But she said with oil prices rising again, she was “reasonably confident” that inflation over the next two to three years would reach the Fed’s 2 percent target, and for that reason a small initial move to hike rates was warranted.
However, in 2016 falling prices for such things as cell phones kept inflation low and since that time, inflation has continued to run below the Fed’s 2 percent target.
Yellen noted that the unemployment in late 2015 stood at 5 percent, 0.7 percentagepoint below where it was at the beginning of the year and businesses were beginning to talk about rising wage pressures. As it turned out, unemployment continued to decline, hitting a 50-year low of 3.9 percent before the pandemic-induced recession started in February 2020.
Daniel Tarullo, at the time a member of the Fed’s board, said he was going along with the December 2015 rate hike but mainly because he believed it was important for the Fed board members to show unanimity with the position taken by the Fed chair.
“The moment of liftoff after seven years would be a particularly bad time to enter a dissent and thereby risk the chair’s leadership position at a critical time in monetary policy,” Tarullo said.
Fed board member Lael Brainard also expressed doubts about the need for a rate hike given the low inflation, but said she would go along with the modest increase.
While winning the vote, Yellen let it be known that she was mindful of opposing views, joking at the end of the discussion that any Fed official who wanted to watch her after-the-meeting news conference and “see me get skewered” by reporters could do so.
As it turned out the quarter-point increase in the Fed’s benchmark rate in December 2015, lifting it to 0.25 percent to 0.5 percent, was not followed by another rate increase for a full year, when it was increased by another quarter-point in December 2016. That increase was followed by three quarter-point rate increases in 2017 as economic growth increased and the unemployment rate fell further.