Furniture companies benefit from pandemic shoppers

Some furniture companiessay they are seeing an uptick in business.

With people stayingclose to home during the pandemic, many Edmontonians havebeenkeen to improve their surroundings.

Customers have been looking to spruce up their home office, while others are wantingmore comfort.

Edmonton real estate agent Vanessa Landry is among them. She not only bought new furnishings, she also bought a new home to put them in.

"I needed to breathe. I felt like I was suffocating," she said in an interview with Radio-Canada.

"Being surrounded by my things all the time made me realize that I needed to change everything.

"I, therefore, bought a new house and new furniture. I changed my bed, my sofa, my kitchen table, everything."

She's not alone, according to Michael Gustavsson, president of Nordic Holdings.

His company operates sevenSofa Land and Konto Furniturestores in Alberta.

Business has increased at the stores and he attributes it to people like Landry who are stuck at home and tired of looking at the same old stuff.

That's good news for the company and its employees.

"We're very happy with it," Gustavsson said. "It has helped[after] being closed for two monthsto get us back on our feet and hire back 95 per centof our employees that we had laid off."

Gustavsson has also noticedmore people purchasing items for their home offices.

"It wasn't a large category for us the last five years because of the way people do business at home with laptops, and most of the time doing it from either your couchor your bed or a kitchen table," he said.

"With people now changing where they're going to be working, we have seen that increase."

The demand for furniture during the pandemic is also being felt on the manufacturing side.

"We were quite pleasantly surprised," said Laine Reynolds, director of Canadian Home Furnishings Alliance and vice-president of sales andmarketing with Superstyle Furniture / Trend-Line Furniture.

"We got quite a surge in business almost immediately."

Reynolds agrees that people spending more time at home has contributed to the increase in sales.

"There was a consumer realization that they'd neglected their home for years and they needed to invest in the comfort of their home," he said. "Our industry is picking up on that.

"We became the benefactor of fewer options to spend your disposable income on," Reynolds said. "We're getting a larger share of the purse, there's no doubt about it."

Some people are even making improvements outside and making their backyard the vacation destination by adding certain accoutrements.

"It's been an incredible, wild ride over the last four months,we've been extremely busy," Warren Yadlowski, general manager of Beachcomber Hot Tubs and Patiotold Edmonton AM on Friday.

"Now we're getting into situations with shortages of supply."

Yadlowski explained there are still some models in stock but those who want certain features or colours could be waiting months. Still, he's pleased business has picked up.

"Wonderfully surprised and happy for what's happened considering what's going on with most businesses in the area," Yadlowski said, adding that they hired more staff to keep up with demand.

Almost every business CBC News spoke to for this story also noted that people's shopping habits have changed during the pandemic.

There are fewer tire-kickers and window shoppers as people are making their purchasing decisions quickly and on-the-spot.