Furniture finally gets a feel for the plush life.

• Position: North Carolina's furniture industry - Industry Overview

For two years, the mystery remained. The economy was booming, retail trade was lively, but furniture sales were flat. "I'm pretty tired of reading that," says John Ong, corporate communications director at High Point-based Ladd Furniture Inc. There's always a lag between the start of good times and when people start furnishing, he says. This one was extra long, but things picked up this fall. "We can't quite figure it out. But all of a sudden they're biting again."

Furniture analyst Jerry Epperson, of Mann, Armistead & Epperson in Richmond, Va., thinks Ong is on target: 1997 "could be one of the best years for North Carolina's furniture manufacturers - ever." The reason, he says, is that they make many of the high-end brands, which are doing well. It's the low-end lines that are suffering, keeping the industry's projected growth rate at about 5% for 1998.

The large public companies that operate in North Carolina saw healthy stock gains in 1997, the first time in recent years. From November 1996 to November 1997, the stock of St. Louis-based Furniture Brands International Inc., which owns the Thomasville and Broyhill brands and employs 15,190 in the state, rose 54%. Danbury, Conn.-based Ethan Allen Interiors Inc., with 1,550 Tar Heel employees, saw a 91% jump. Monroe, Mich.-based La-Z-Boy Inc., which has 289 employees in Lincolnton, was up 35%, and Ladd, which employs 2,150 Tar Heels, increased 12%.

In the low-end side of the market, though, High Point-based Singer Furniture Co. closed all its operations, including its 700-employee Lenoir factory. Bassett Furniture Industries Inc. of Bassett, Va., cut 400 of the 1,700 it employed in the state when it shut down its Hildebran plant in July.

The explanation for the imbalance lies partly with demographics. Baby boomers have moved into upper-end furniture. "The retail and manufacturing base we still have now was built to support that huge population," Epperson says. But there are fewer young customers to buy the less-expensive "starter" lines, which also have been hit hard by foreign competition.

It's not just cheap sofas that are holding down the industry, says Ivan Saul Cutler, associate director of furniture-industry services at the High Point consulting firm BDO Seidman LLC. Furniture makers have done a poor job of marketing products to the post-1950s population. "Some of the production facilities are from that time, and so are many of the designs. And the older men who make it are not...