by Product initially will be sold direct to consumers on company website, other e-commerce platforms
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — A group of investors is looking to revive Stanley Furniture with an e-commerce platform that aims to reconnect the brand with consumers in the U.S. market.
Christopher B. Beselin — a partner in Southeast Asia investment firm Endurance Capital — and a group of investors with experience in e-commerce acquired the brand about a year ago and are launching its first new collection online next week on www.stanleyfurniture.com.
With plans to also sell the line on Wayfair, it will offer some 30-40 pieces of bedroom, dining and occasional furniture in a mix of styles ranging from coastal and traditional to metropolitan.
Describing the initial launch as a small, limited-edition collection, Beselin said the company has taken its time to develop a product mix that will resonate with consumers.
“The brand has been out of the market for three or four years, so it took us a long time,” he said of the product development process. “It is never easy to develop a new collection, but to revive it from scratch, we wanted to go step by step to make sure we got it right.”
Beselin said this is the first new product the company has launched in the past few years since Endurance took control of the brand as part of a foreclosure sale around May 2021. It acquired the assets from former owner Walter Blocker, of Churchill Downs LLC, who originally acquired the company from Stanley Furniture in early 2018.
By early 2022, Endurance was working with Houston advisory firm RMP Partners to revive the brand in the U.S. market. However, Beselin told Home News Now that the effort ultimately was not successful. And because Endurance only invests in publicly versus privately owned assets, Beselin and a group of investors stepped in to acquire the brand a year ago, purchasing the brand name, the intellectual property and the web domain, which launched about six months ago.
The goal is to revive the brand through an e-commerce platform that will sell the line directly to consumers. Beselin, who is the chairman and founder of Southeast Asia-based e-commerce platform Intrepid and also the cofounder and former CEO of Vietnam-based e-commerce specialist Lazada.vn, has extensive marketplace experience and is working with a team that also has experience in the field.
Beselin said the Stanley product is being produced in several small-scale factories in Vietnam that are akin to workshops in both their size and attention to handcrafted details. It is expected to hit the U.S. next week and shipped to a warehouse in Houston that will distribute it directly to consumers that order products on the Stanley website and on Wayfair.
To garner attention in the marketplace, the company is marketing the revived brand through social media platforms including Facebook, Google and Affiliate Marketing.
“We need to find our way in terms of the exact marketing mix, but we are already doing work in these channels,” Beselin said. “So it’s primarily online marketing as the first step. We also will do more and more organic brand building, working with influencers from the industry. But it’s also important to show the new collection and what the brand stands for.”
But he said the Stanley website also has received 1,000 inquiries from consumers who have previously purchased/owned products in the line.
“We get inbound requests every day where people are saying, ‘I bought this 10 years ago and it has fantastic quality,’” he said, noting that much of the interest appears to be from consumers in states such as Florida and Texas. “To me that kind of speaks to the brand equity that is there. There is still a following around the brand even though it has been out of the market for three to four years, which to me is quite remarkable. In all the businesses we have invested in, or that I have been active in over the years, the level of spontaneous inbounds is extremely rare, and here you get three to five a day, which is a bit of a eureka.”
While the line is now produced overseas, he hinted that the availability of custom options down the road could open the door to some level of domestic manufacturing in the future.
And as the brand, which celebrated its 100-year anniversary in 2024, develops more traction, there could be further steps taken to reintroduce it to brick and mortar.
“For sure there will be that opportunity, but it is just a question of prioritizing,” Beselin said, noting that the direct-to-consumer model is just a starting point. He added that a push toward brick and mortar also would require a sales team, inventory and other resources on the ground. “We want to do this organically and not rush. I think we are going to get there sooner or later, but it will be step by step.”
“This is a 100-year old brand, and I think there is a way to revive it with a good proper turnaround of something with a great legacy,” he added. “That is the most exciting part for me.”
