Tapping the kids market; furniture to grow up with
By Lisa Morgan
From manufacturers of solid wood traditional pieces to designers of high style ready-to-assemble, those in the kids’ furniture business agree: Youth furniture is booming.
“We focus on four things when it comes to children’s furniture: sleep, study, storage and safety,” said Russell Page, Maine-based Moosehead’s manager of sales. “The concerns of the consumer are not price — they’re value-related. They come in with specific needs, and those needs relate to those four criteria.”
Moosehead also offers children’s furniture that’s built to last and to fit in seamlessly with adult furniture in the house in terms of both style and construction. Two of the company’s collections, Maine Street and Ashland Valley, “go from cribs to king-sized beds and everything in between,” said Page.
“It’s a growing market,” said Rob Halsten, vice president of sales and marketing for Crawford of Jamestown. Crawford makes solid wood children’s furniture in four of its collections.
“With our youth program, we’ve taken several of our collections and offered youth-size, to-scale furniture,” he said. “It’s the same quality and the same styling. We offer a basic look that can grow with the child, and our furniture is solid wood, so it has a good story behind it.”
Designer Drew Maple agrees about the growth potential of youth furniture. Maple designed youth pieces as part of O’Sullivan’s Xpressions line, and won the 1999 Pinnacle Award for his work. Xpressions was introduced in 1998 to appeal to a “Generation X” market of teens and newlyweds; O’Sullivan “determined that the youth category was a strong trend” and added youth pieces to the line in April 1999. With the national birthrate remaining high — near the four million mark in recent years according to statistics from the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association — the kids’ furniture market is unlikely to shrink anytime soon.
Not only is that market large, “Parents are more willing now to make an investment than they have been in the past,” noted Donna Niemerg of I.D. Kids. “There’s more of a demand for high-quality furniture for kids,” she added, and parents and grandparents recognize that quality costs.
Parents want safe, sturdy furniture that will last — maybe until college or beyond. How should that furniture look? There are two schools of thought on kids’ furniture design today: fun, contemporary all-in-one units and individual pieces, usually laminates, often in a wide range of bright colors; and classic, ageless pieces of solid wood in traditional finishes — a range of stains, plus white and other neutral paints. There’s still a market for painted wood and pieces featuring characters from cartoons, books and movies, but, says Halsten, “Those are looks that kids eventually grow out of.” Parents looking to make a sound investment want furniture that grows with their children.
Timeless and Traditional
Moosehead’s customers, said Page, aren’t interested in “disposable furniture.”
“If a parent is going to invest in good quality furniture, they want that furniture to last from a quality standpoint, but they also don’t want to have to go out and buy a whole different group [for style reasons]. They want to be able to add to it, to purchase pieces that go with it down the road.
“We do wall units, but not the big all-in-one units. That’s not an adult bedroom set — it’s something a child can grow out of, and we don’t do things they can grow out of. They can take our bedrooms to college or when they move out, or mom and dad can use it as a guestroom. We aim for longevity not just in quality, but also in functionality.”
Moosehead’s customers take that ethic even more seriously than the company expected. “It surprised us how many of the larger case pieces our retailers were selling for kids. We sell a tremendous number of armoires to kids.” Other popular storage pieces include drawer units that fit under beds.
Given the cross-generational uses of much of the company’s furniture, Page said, “All the drawers, even in adult furniture, have safety catches.” The company also offers guardrails for twin beds and ensures its products meet tip-ability standards.
Fun, Functional Contemporary Pieces
At the other end of the youth-furniture spectrum are the compact, colorful designs from I.D. Kids, a laminate supplier with “an almost endless color palette.”
“Right now,” said Niemerg, “there’s been a demand for a compact sleep, study and storage area. There’s been demand for wall systems that would include a study area, a storage area and then a double sleep area. People want to utilize as much space as they can in the child’s room, which is typically one of the smaller bedrooms in a house.”
Keeping sleep, study and storage in a compact space allows maximum floor space for play — an important consideration for parents. I.D. Kids “is all about vertical storage,” said Niemerg. “We have some units within the product line that offer storage up the wall, so you’re utilizing as much space as you can.”
Sleep space — how much and in what permutations — is an obvious consideration in a child’s bedroom. I.D. Kids receives many requests for bunkbeds that offer a twin bed over a full bed, as well as for loft systems that allow a desk, dresser or other furniture to fit under the bed. Again, the focus is on keeping floor space open and sleep, study and storage space in as small an area as is functional.
Color is a strong trend, says Niemerg. “You see, even in wood products, that color is becoming key. You see painted wood, stained wood. The more traditional wood finishes are still strong, but a lot of manufacturers are trying to get color into their lines.”
As kids play with more high-tech toys — such as video and computer games, as well as TVs, VCRs, and stereos — at younger ages than ever before, I.D. Kids has begun receiving requests for furniture that accommodates all that gadgetry.
“We do have units that incorporate technology well. We’re also developing more units that are geared toward a complete computer workstation, because kids today do have a lot more electronics than they did in years past.”
Part of I.D. Kids’ strategy is to incorporate ergonomic designs such as keyboard drawers into desks; to develop units with wire chases to secure wires; and to offer more storage space specifically for CDs, video games and VHS tapes — “things to keep the clutter off the floor and organize it.”
“More and more manufacturers do seriously need to consider the technology in kids’ rooms,” said Niemerg.
