LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Ashley Furniture
built 290 days ago
Ashley Furniture HomeStore will roll out Channel M to 300 stores over the next 18 months. With large store layouts, Ashley Furniture HomeStore will play Channel M content on most or all of the 24 screens in each store. BroadSign's software enabled the network to meet the key criteria of being able to change content during the day to appeal to different psychographics. The network will show music videos, corporate commercials and mattress ads.
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Ashley Furniture had grown from a simple table factory in 1970 to a design leader with huge nationwide sales in the 1980s. The company had worked hard to innovate, incorporating new technology to compete with cheap imports, designing eye-catching furniture that led with style, and moving into new market categories, such as bedroom furniture, to increase its options. Ashley continued to be a quick-moving, vital company in the 1990s, making changes to capture new markets and capitalize on cost-saving equipment. Its great success was its polyester laminate Millennium line, which alone accounted for sales of $100 million in the early 1990s. Although the company had bought expensive new equipment for laminating around 1989, by 1993 Ashley upgraded again, installing a state-of-the-art thermo-laminating press. CEO Wanek was eager to spend money to keep the company on the cutting edge technologically.
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In 1945, Carlyle Weinberger started Ashley Furniture as a sales operation in Chicago. In 1970, Weinberger invested in Ron Wanek's Arcadia Furniture, a manufacturing business in Arcadia, Wisconsin. The two businesses became Ashley Furniture in 1976. The company manufactures living room, dining room, bedroom, entertainment, home office furniture and other home furnishings. The company sells its products through dealers and through more than 100 independently owned Ashley Homestores.
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To make the kind of furniture Wanek was sure customers would like, Ashley needed to upgrade its technology and find a way to compete on price with imports. Imports began to be a significant factor in the American furniture market in the early 1980s. In 1983 alone, the percentage of imports increased almost 50 percent, according to a profile of Ashley in the April 1986 Wisconsin Business. Although the same article describes the furniture industry as a whole at that time as 'sleepy,' Wanek took notice, and in 1984 he traveled to Taiwan to investigate. He found what is by now a commonplace of the global market--low wages, low cost for facilities, and a tariff of less than three percent for Taiwanese furniture entering the United States. Ashley did begin importing inexpensive parts from Asia to keep its own costs down, but more important, the company moved quickly to build itself an unassailable domestic market.
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In May 2006, American Century filed a civil action lawsuit against Ashley Furniture for injunctive relief and damages for the violation of the copyright laws of the United States. American Century claims that Ashley Furniture has directly copied one of their best selling patterns entitled “Union;” a pattern that was originally created by Art Cottage in 2002. American Century registered the pattern and received a copyright on November 4 2005.
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To strengthen its position in motion furniture, Ashley acquired another Mississippi company in 1999. This was Gentry Furniture, of Ripley, Mississippi, a leading maker of reclining sofas and sectionals. Ashley gambled that motion furniture was still a strong growth area. It continued and expanded Gentry's lines and used its plant solely for motion furniture. Its other Mississippi upholstery plant, in Ecru, devoted itself exclusively to stationary furniture. In 1999 the company ... branched out into retailing, licensing stores to independent dealers.
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Ashley Furniture