Features
July/August 2005

Three students and a furniture mart

 

They spent a week ordering rugs, lamps, mattresses and anything else that struck their fancy and appealed to their tastes, ordering much of what the Gallery Furniture buying team would bring back to its involved and energetic boss.

Three Mays marketing majors were apprentice furniture buyers for a week in April in High Point, North Carolina, during one of the largest home furnishings market weeks in the nation. Juniors Aaron Gregg and Jessica Fletcher and senior Chelsea Ray were sent out on a two-pronged mission by Gallery Furniture's charismatic owner Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale: Aid Mack's eight-man team in finding his picks for the store, and add their own vibrant flair to the furniture that will be on display in his 250,000-square-foot furniture wonderland.

Tromping through a furniture-utopia of a downtown in High Point, the students got lost in rows of bedding and piles of stylish rugs and more than once forgot to eat lunch. Fletcher, Gregg and Ray would point out their favorites and debate trends in home furnishings as they closely shadowed their Gallery Furniture guides.

"You really started to understand what it was like to be a buyer," Ray said. "What if it doesn't sell? You really fall in love with a lamp and then wonder: What if that's just your taste and not a customer's taste?"

Aaron Gregg viewing order details
Marketing major Aaron Gregg reviews details with a Gallery Furniture buyer before placing an order with a mattress and bedding vendor.

The experience added a third dimension to the classroom instruction of professor Cheryl Holland Bridges, also associate director of the Center for Retailing Studies, whose 25 years as a buyer and lead merchandiser in the retailing industry translate into detailed, practical lectures. Guest speakers such as Mattress Mack spark animated class discussions with retail-minded students.

And this year, Mack extended his commitment to education further, inviting three students to spend an expenses-paid week as consultants with his team. They joined a throng of 70,000 industry buyers and wholesalers crammed into one small North Carolina town center.

"Mack really made the class come to life by giving the students the opportunity to actually practice in a real-life situation what they were learning in the classroom," Bridges says of the guest lecturer who usually gets the most lively reactions from his classroom talks. "I deeply appreciate what he did in this instance, and what he continues to do for the students of Texas A&M University."

Houston's Gallery Furniture is among the nation's largest single-store furniture retailers, and Mattress Mack's model of entertainment-parade-meets-bedroom-sets has children gazing at parrots and munching popcorn while their parents mull over financing decisions. The students' boss for the week already knew the price and location of every item on the floor of his huge showroom, and that kept his team in High Point on their toes as they fielded his calls and requests during the weeklong market trip, the students recalled.

And, in all this, the students' picks for bedding, accessories and wood finishes were shipped to Houston alongside Mack's special customer requests. "Our opinion mattered, they really wanted to see our taste out there, our fresh ideas," Fletcher recalls.

Mack's philosophy on selling his merchandise set the buying team apart in the furniture market. Mack's desk by the front door of his literal furniture warehouse (he does his best to stock most of his inventory in the store rather than retain it in his 50,000-square foot warehouse) gives him immediate access to customers and their needs. His high-intensity sales approach echoes "Saves you money!" in the minds of anyone within broadcast distance of Houston TV commercials.

Fletcher and Ray laughed as they described packing heels and pressed blouses for the trip. Mack's approachable style means his ground troops headed into the best-known wholesale furniture outlets in jeans and Gallery Furniture-emblazoned polo shirts.

That left more than one vendor scrambling to fetch drinks and freebies for the Gallery Furniture teams once they realized the size of the store's order. "They have this underdog approach," says Gregg, who watched a Tempur-Pedic representative's eyes light up when he realized the single-store location sells Tempur-Pedic mattresses faster than any store in the nation. "People don't expect a lot of them and that works to their advantage. You come in unpretentious, and once they realize they need your business, they needed us and not us them."

The undergraduates each culled different impressions from their brief apprenticeship. Fletcher walked away confirmed in her career choice, knowing once and for all that "this is for me," she said. Gregg, a would-be political scientist drawn to the business world, found opportunity and contacts, happily holding his cell phone aloft to exclaim: "I have Mack's cell phone on my phone and I know the president and CEO of Tempur-Pedic, too."

For Ray, who earned her degree in May and began work as a marketing assistant for a College Station disaster-recovery company, the experience was the culmination of her undergraduate career and a glance at a key area in the functioning world of business.

"The class is like packing two years of buying training into one semester," she said. "By being able to go on this trip, it was that much more of an experience. Now we know what Mrs. Bridges' excitement was all about when she talked about buying."