Will the furniture industry return to Piedmont Triad?

Yahoo

07-05-2025

(WGHP) — If you're of a certain age, you might remember a classic commercial for the stock broker firm, E.F. Hutton, which was later acquired by Lehman Brothers, in which some business folks were talking over lunch when one says, 'Well, my broker is E.F. Hutton, and E.F. Hutton says …,' and the room instantly goes silent as everyone leans in to hear what it is that the E.F. Hutton broker had told the man. President Donald Trump seems to have something of that same effect when he talks about industries he believes he can get to return their production to the U.S.
Recently, he mentioned one of those while speaking in the Oval Office.
'North Carolina. I used to go there to buy furniture for hotels, and it's been wiped out. That business all went to other countries, and now it's all going to come back into North Carolina,' Trump said.
Now that would be quite a story. Furniture quite literally built much of the Piedmont Triad with a plethora of names that still roll romantically off the tongues of people who were around in their heyday.
'I grew up in a furniture family,' said Tammy Covington, who is the CEO of the High Point Market Authority, which hosts the famous industry convention twice each year. 'We all wish the days of making products domestically were a reality. It's been a long time since we've done that, and a lot has changed.'
Those names may exist on some furniture sold in the US today, but most of it is made elsewhere: names like Thomasville, Lexington, Century, Henredon and Bassett.
Some still exist. Chris Morris owns Vision Contract Manufacturing, building furniture on contract and does it for a number of brands, including making most of the furniture in the Great Wolf Lodges across the country.
'I grew up in High Point, so I saw when the factories were here, supporting a grocery store on every corner, supporting the factories, and then they're gone,' Morris said.
The challenge the president is going to find, according to Tim Stump who runs Stump & Company, an analyst and merger and acquisition specialist, is that it would take longer than Trump's term to get any significant manufacturing up and running in the US, and few CEOs are going to put that much capital at risk when they don't know what the next president may do.
'I don't think it's going to be any of these mega projects like he's doing with the chip companies or the Amazons and the mega projects we have … in Siler City,' said Stump of big operations like the Wolfspeed chip factory near Chatham County. 'I just don't see at scale that we can move … enough furniture back to the US to move the needle.'
See more on this subject in this edition of The Buckley Report.
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