How Wholesale Furniture Orders are Placed with Overseas Manufacturers
Wholesale Furniture has traditionally been ordered from High Point, North Carolina in the United States up until about ten years ago. Normally a furniture store would go to the furniture trade show and select vendors with their best estimate of current styles and designs which their customers are going to request. Since the manufacturing base in North Carolina has been decimated by foreign competition, most notably from China but also in Brazil, Vietnam, India and Malaysia, the rules for purchasing wholesale furniture have changed. In order to make your furniture shopping life easier, I will explain the most direct route to purchasing items from overseas manufacturers.
If you have the ability to go to a notable furniture trade show in either Las Vegas or High Point, that is still your least travel intrusive way of locating foreign manufacturers. Most furniture manufacturers still travel across the ocean to the United States as even in times of recession we are still the largest consumers of almost all consumer items including furniture. Many trade shows cluster the participants around either the style of furniture they are representing, contemporary, classic, transitional, or the country the manufacturer is from. A few years ago at the house wares show in Chicago there was an entire hall just dedicated to Chinese manufacturers. If you go in mind to what type of wholesale furniture you are looking for, you can greatly reduce the amount of walking time you need to do at the furniture show.
The next best way to located overseas furniture manufacturers is to go to international shows if you have the budget and don’t mind 15 hour flights. A few notable shows are the China International Furniture Expo in Guangdong, China and the IMM Cologne in Germany. When you go to any of the three shows mentioned you are going to find that a lot of the manufacturers are represented in all of the shows and there are only a few smaller manufactures showing. Smaller manufactures, sometimes the real hidden gems of the wholesale furniture shows, don’t always show because their capacity is small and is usually pre purchased either by local furniture stores or larger international furniture wholesalers.
If you are unable to attend any furniture shows, you can look online for reputable furniture wholesale companies. A local wholesale furniture company is going to charge a mark up for their services but what really is in the mark up is the cost of going to the shows and the storage of the furniture once purchased. For many small and large companies alike, purchasing from a US based furniture wholesale company is the best option for the least amount of effort and work.
Writer is a freelance writer specializing in wholesale furniture.
Processing your request, Please wait....
