Anisa Khalifa: If you've bought a couch in the last few years, you've probably noticed that…
Unidentified Speaker: Buying furniture is terrible, it's, it's really hard, it takes forever to show up at your house, it might be broken or damaged…It's just a hassle.
Anisa Khalifa: But it didn't used to be like that. In the 20th century, our furniture was domestically made, beautifully crafted, and lasted for generations. It was forever furniture. And you bought it in-person.
(SOUNDBITE FROM ARCHIVAL DOCUMENTARY)
Unidentified Narrator: Produced by the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service, your host, Hal Reynolds.
Anisa Khalifa: The engine of that American furniture industry was right here in North Carolina in the town of High Point.
Hal Reynolds: You know we manufacture more furniture right here in Piedmont, North Carolina than any other area in the world, right here.
Anisa Khalifa: But in the last 25 years, Americans have turned toward cheaper, disposable furniture. We're more likely to reach for Wayfair than one of North Carolina's iconic legacy brands. I'm Anisa Khalifa. This is the Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week: the changing story of North Carolina furniture, and what that means for a regular person just…trying to buy a chair.
If you live in North Carolina, you probably know that furniture has a legacy here. My introduction to this state's history of furniture making was through — rugs, of all things…
Zaki Khalifa: This art is about 4, 000 years old…
Anisa Khalifa: This is my dad's cousin, Zaki Khalifa. Uncle Zaki. Or as I call him, Zaki Taya. He's the storyteller in our family.
Zaki Khalifa: The oldest recorded rug is about 2,600 years old. It is in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
Anisa Khalifa: Young Zaki fell in love with the handmade oriental rugs in his grandfather's house…and he dreamed of going into business for himself. When he grew up, he decided he wanted to take this beautiful heritage art worldwide. So he traveled to Switzerland, and England — but ultimately, he chose the vast, populous United States as his ideal market. So at age 31, in a scene right out of a movie, he went to America with 500 dollars in his pocket.
Zaki Khalifa: And the day I first entered the United States was July 4th, 1976. The Bicentennial celebrations were on. So I thought all the ships in the harbor were there to welcome me, but I found out differently.
Anisa Khalifa: Turns out, Zaki's dream was a hard sell to the immigration inspectors who interrogated him for more than an hour. But he eventually got that entry permit. In the following weeks, he spent some time traveling around America to scout out locations for his new business. But it didn’t take long before he found out that High Point, North Carolina was where he needed to be.
Zaki Khalifa: Because as most people may know, High Point, North Carolina is regarded as the home furnishings capital of the world.
Anisa Khalifa: In 1977, Zaki opened his first, small showroom on Main Street. In the following decades, the business grew along with the furniture industry in Central North Carolina. It was a symbiotic relationship. People would come to High Point to buy furniture, and they would find their way to his store, often becoming lifelong customers.
Zaki Khalifa: Sometimes on a single day, High Point attracted 1,500 customers who came to High Point just to buy furniture for their home. It kept us very, very busy.
Anisa Khalifa: At its height, Zaki Oriental Rugs had a one hundred thousand square foot showroom that covered a city block in downtown High Point. I remember running around in it as a kid. It was huge, filled with thousands of rugs stacked up high, perfect for little legs to climb on. Zaki’s business was rugs. But like a lot of shops in the region, it lived and died by the furniture economy in High Point. And so for my entire life, I’ve heard him talk about this massive event called the High Point Market. It’s the center of the furniture universe. And it's still growing.
Zaki Khalifa: The furniture market only had two million square feet when I opened. And now it has more than twelve million.
Anisa Khalifa: According to Zaki, if you want to know anything about furniture, this is the place. So I went there to find out why the furniture experience in America is so bad right now.
The High Point Market is a five-day exhibition where sellers and furniture manufacturers can show off the new season's inventory. It’s not open to the public, so this was my first time. And it was even bigger than I'd imagined.
Ben Muller: During the weekend, this area is kind of hustling and bustling. We have concerts here. So the Goo Goo Dolls were here, um, Sunday night.
Anisa Khalifa: Sadly, for me, everything did not feel like the movies. I missed the show, because I got there on a Tuesday. But I did get a sense of the scale of this thing. The market takes over the entire downtown.
Tammy Nagum: Hello.
Anisa Khalifa: So y'all probably had a really tiring weekend.
Tammy Nagum: Yeah, so let's hope I can string a sentence together, how's that.
Anisa Khalifa: Tammy Nagum is the president and CEO of the High Point Market Authority. As we began to chat, I realized pretty quickly that my plan of wandering around on foot and discovering the market organically… wasn't gonna work.
Tammy Nagum: The High Point Market takes place in about 180 buildings across 13 blocks of downtown High Point. Total of 11 and a half million square feet of show space with about 2,000 exhibitors and about 75,000 people come to High Point twice a year for the market. And it's just grown over the years to now be an international event drawing attendees from, um, over 110 countries.
Anisa Khalifa: High Point's population is only a little over 100,000, which means more people visit for the market every year than actually live there. And these crowds provide a big economic boost to the region.
Tammy Nagum: Because of that presence here, this market is a 6.7 billion dollar economic impact to the state of North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: 6.7 billion. That's equivalent to FIVE Super Bowls. And Tammy says that it's not just furniture retailers that come to market — nowadays, 60 percent of visitors are designers. One of the keynote speakers the week I was there was Joanna Gaines, of Fixxer Upper fame.
Tammy Nagum: We here locally call this the furniture market, but it's a lot more than furniture. So this is home decor, accessories. This is everything that contributes to the home furnishings trade. So if you make software to help run a retail store, you're going to be in High Point twice a year.
Anisa Khalifa: To be clear — this isn't the only market out there that showcases home furnishings and connects buyers, sellers and designers. But Tammy says two things set it apart.
Tammy Nagum: One is new product. High point is where the new product is introduced…we have the volume of exhibitors to show those new products. Our showrooms are also larger, so they're able to …make that new product introduction easier to show. The second thing is Southern Hospitality. I think we're known across the world for how we treat our guests.
Anisa Khalifa: What does the market mean to North Carolina and High Point? You gave me the numbers, but like, in addition to that, what do you think it means for our state and for this town?
Tammy Nagum: You travel to other parts of the world and someone asks you where you're from and you say High Point, North Carolina, many times who you're talking to looks back at you and says, ah, furniture. We have a brand here that, um, is not found in most cities our size. And, uh, I think that's something we can all be proud of.
Anisa Khalifa: After my conversation with Tammy, I was curious to talk to one of the furniture makers that helped create that international brand. So I hopped on a shuttle bus and visited the showroom of one of the state’s iconic furniture companies…
Federico Contigiani: First time at Market?
Anisa Khalifa: Yes, it's a little overwhelming.
Federico Contigiani: Oh, I believe.
Anisa Khalifa: And I got a chance to talk to the big boss.
Federico Contigiani: My name is Federico Contigiani and I'm the president of Hickory Chair.
Anisa Khalifa: Federico actually has a background in the Italian luxury furniture industry, but he's been in North Carolina for a while. He now leads Hickory Chair — which at 113 years old, has been around almost as long as the High Point Market itself. For generations, North Carolinians have worked in their western North Carolina factory.
Federico Contigiani: Of course, there are major, uh, manufacturing areas overseas in Europe or, uh, in Southeast Asia, and they're really good at certain things. Uh, but the level of quality that you can get out of North Carolina, it's really hard to match, especially, especially on a larger scale.
Anisa Khalifa: But that kind of quality is also expensive to produce. Federico says, partly because of that, the North Carolina furniture industry is actually shrinking.
Federico Contigiani: It's also becoming a, uh, very competitive market, and not every company makes it.
Anisa Khalifa: Despite all of the fanfare of the Market — the hundreds of exhibitors, the Goo Goo Dolls, Joanna Gaines — Federico says many of the legacy brands have closed up shop. For those that remain, like Hickory, they’ve had to come up with creative strategies to survive. Because forever furniture is a tough sell these days.
Federico Contigiani: The majority of people buy disposable furniture. Life has changed. Uh, we don't know necessarily where we're going to live in ten years from today.
Anisa Khalifa: And the middle has dropped out of the furniture industry. You can either buy really cheap things or super expensive ones like those made at Hickory Chair.
Federico Contigiani: Of course, our products are not, uh, inexpensive and they're not, uh, accessible by everybody. But I can, at the same time, I can tell you that the phone we all carry in our pocket is an expensive piece of equipment. But that's valuable to us and we're willing to spend that kind of money. Um, if a sofa or a chair or a dining table is valuable to someone, uh, eventually they will find a way.
Anisa Khalifa: But this choice between cheap, disposable furniture, and luxury high-end stuff—where does that leave consumers…in this economy? After a break: how we got here and what the future of American furniture looks like.
Matt Hartman is a reporter at the Assembly, an online outlet covering North Carolina. He's also an amateur carpenter.
Matt Hartman: So, during COVID, I started making furniture as a hobby. And as I got more into it, I was just sort of curious about the, you know, I knew North Carolina had a deep furniture legacy, but I didn't know that much about it.
Anisa Khalifa: And as is often the case with journalists, a niche personal interest soon turned into a story idea. Matt started working on a piece about hobbyist furniture makers and small scale craftspeople.
Matt Hartman: And as I talked to more people, I started to get the sense that this industry, which in my head was very much about making stuff, and about this very tangible, concrete, old school kind of manufacturing. The more people I talked to, the more it started to seem like there was something interesting happening where more of the industry was about service.
Anisa Khalifa: One of the people Matt talked to was a master chairmaker named Elia Bizzarri who’s based out of Hillsborough, North Carolina. Bizzarri told him he only sells 10 to 15 chairs a year.
Matt Hartman: It sort of blew me away because he's pretty well known, and it turns out lots of his income was coming from teaching classes and selling supplies to other people who took his classes. And I wanted to see if that trend and this, um, this sort of shift was happening, not just at the small scale individual craftsmen, but at the scale of the North Carolina furniture industry.
Anisa Khalifa: But before going down that path, Matt wanted to understand how we got here. So he went back to the first time North Carolina furniture took off…in the 1800s.
Matt Hartman: In 1890, there were six companies making $159,000 worth of furniture. So really small. 10 years later, it had grown to 44 companies and $1.5 million worth of furniture. And then by the beginning of the Great Depression it was up to 56.7 million. That's just all in the High Point area. And then World War II, as people are coming back, the G.I. Bill, the sort of explosion of the housing market, people needed furniture to fill their houses, and North Carolina's the place where all that furniture was made.
Anisa Khalifa: But in the late nineties, this hundred-year boom suddenly collapsed. In 1999, the very same year we were bracing for Y2K, the U.S. signed a trade agreement with China.
Matt Hartman: In 1994, there were 241 million dollars of furniture imported from China, and then by 2004 it's 4.2 billion. So it had grown 17 times over in 10 years. That trade agreement really just opened the floodgates. And then by 2016, 73 percent of all the furniture in the United States was imported. So the production, the manufacturing side of the industry was just decimated. You had, within one four year stretch, 230 factories close and 56,000 people laid off.
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Unidentified Anchor: Hickory, North Carolina and surrounding counties have been known for decades as a mecca for furniture manufacturing.
Unidentified Anchor: But the business of making tables, chairs, and sofas is changing because of cheap labor overseas and sluggish sales at home.
Unidentified Anchor: These days, the area is also becoming known as one of the fastest rising unemployment centers in the nation.
Anisa Khalifa: The chain of those generational artisans was broken. In North Carolina, families who had worked in the furniture industry for many decades suddenly left permanently. Today, most consumers can't tell the difference between a 99 dollar chair made in China and a seemingly identical one made in North Carolina that costs 1500…and whether the price really reflects the quality of the piece. Often you just opt for disposable furniture instead. But then, you end up in IKEA hell, struggling to assemble a HEMNES dresser with nothing but a flimsy little allen key.
Matt Hartman: Buying furniture is terrible. It's really hard, it takes forever to show up at your house, it might be broken or damaged and you have to replace it — it's just, it's just a hassle.
Anisa Khalifa: Furniture IS still produced in North Carolina, but it's more upholstered and custom goods than the classic wooden stuff like beds and tables. And it's gotten a lot more expensive.
Matt Hartman: Just in general, furniture is a really low margin business. The profit margins are, are really tight. And so, one way to make the business work is to try to increase that by sort of having a luxury good.
Anisa Khalifa: Nowhere is that more clear than at the High Point Market. When I was there, I was surprised to see how many designers were attending. 60 percent of buyers at the Market are now designers.
Matt Hartman: And so designers are guiding the people who can afford their services through that and helping them figure out what stuff is worth buying and taking some of that headache off of them.
Anisa Khalifa: Nowadays, North Carolina furniture is bespoke, high-end and customizable. And that means that manufacturers are now marketing to designers rather than direct to consumers. One example of this is Rock House Farm, a company that acquired a bunch of iconic North Carolina brands — among them Hickory Chair. Matt spoke to the company’s CEO Alex Shuford, who said something that surprised him.
Matt Hartman: This is the person who I thought would say our furniture is better because it's made here and that's why people are happy with it. That's why we can sell it at the price we sell it at, all those sorts of things. And he was pretty clear that's not the case, right? He said, what separates them and what makes consumers happier with them is that the retail experience is better.
Anisa Khalifa: Huh.
Matt Hartman: And that's because they go through designers or they sell at higher end stores that have more trained sales people. Their real differentiator is that you can go in and pick a piece of furniture and then pick out the type of wood you want or the grain pattern or whatever. You know, I think in general, people understand that not everything, unless you have lots of disposable income, not everything can be the heirloom piece. And so, sometimes the cheap particle board shelf is all you need, or the chair that's going to last for two years, and then you'll have to figure it out.
Anisa Khalifa: And while all this – the offshoring, the labor costs, the market pivots – may feel like 21st century problems, Matt says that this actually isn't the first time we've had this kind of massive shift in the American furniture industry. 100 years ago, we were the place that everything got outsourced to.
Matt Hartman: So prior to the growth of the industry here, New York, Michigan were the, the real centers of furniture production. The reason it took off here is because we had cheaper labor and we had cheaper labor for a few reasons. One is that back in the 1890s when this was starting, there was a big agricultural depression. So timing wise, it worked out for the, the, for the factory owners. Um, two is there aren't labor unions here in the way that there were in the other places. And three is, uh, because of the legacy of slavery and the way it shaped our economy in North Carolina, general wages were lower and that was something furniture makers were able to exploit. So on that timescale North Carolina was like the intermediate stop rather than the birth of something that was then lost.
Zaki Khalifa: After about 30 years, there were many, many changes. There were some very, very large furniture stores that were open to the public year round. And, uh, unfortunately, nine of those ten stores have closed down in the meantime.
Anisa Khalifa: As the furniture industry slowed down in High Point, my uncle Zaki's customer base narrowed too. And those gorgeous, incredibly intricate rugs he fell in love with as a child — they're just not being made anymore. Zaki closed his store last October, and moved back to Pakistan, to focus on charitable work. As for High Point, Zaki Oriental Rugs is just one of the many defunct retail stores that once made it the place to buy home furnishings. The crowds of ordinary Americans, who would travel long distances to shop for furniture and accessories they couldn't get anywhere else… they've disappeared. When I was there for the Market, I couldn't help but think how busy downtown High Point was compared to how quiet it is every other time of the year.
Earlier this year, when I talked to Zaki Taya at a temporary showroom where he'd moved his remaining inventory for liquidation, I asked him about what all this means for us. Normal people just trying to find a comfortable couch.
Zaki Khalifa: Well, um, you are asking a 79-year-old this question, and I'm supposed to respond as an advice for young people. The young people today are very, very influenced by fashion trends. And this is all part of the culture, and no culture is superior or inferior.
Anisa Khalifa: Like a good uncle, Zaki says the best thing we can do is spend smartly. Sometimes, we need the cheap, disposable IKEA stuff. But, he told me when I DO have the money, I should choose quality over fashion.
Zaki Khalifa: Is that not a better investment of your time and money?
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of the Broadside was produced by me and edited by Jerad Walker. Wilson Sayre is our executive producer. If you'd like to check out Matt Hartman's reporting about furniture for the Assembly, you'll find a link in the show notes. Thanks to the team at the High Point Market Authority for their help during Market week, especially Ben Muller - you heard him tell me about the Goo Goo Dolls concert. Special thanks also to NC State Libraries' Special Collections Research Center for allowing us to use audio from an amazing documentary TV program from the 60s. The Broadside is a production of WUNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR Network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend. I'm Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.