Filed under: Design, etc, News & Trends
Home furnishings and decor chain Restoration Hardware undergoes a major overhaul to attract a new audience and save the brand.This Thursday, WSJ. Magazine takes a close look at the rebirth of Restoration Hardware under co-CEO Gary Friedman. We've got an exclusive snapshot of the piece before you can read it in full on Thursday.
The changing face of Restoration Hardware. Photo: WSJ. Magazine.
"In 2008, it wasn't clear whether we were going to make it," says Gary Friedman, tanned and wearing a vintage leather motorcycle jacket, an Alexander Yamaguchi henley and artfully distressed jeans, energetic despite a metaphysical tinge of road dust about him. In fact, he's just off the plane from a weeklong buying jaunt through India, Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore and Thailand. The recession, which proved unkind to the home-furnishings segment in general (latest victim: Williams-Sonoma Home, or at least its freestanding stores), was particularly challenging for a company with a turbulent history and a muddled identity.
Rather than hedging, he says, the company doubled down. "We said, 'Let's forget about the customer for a minute,' " Friedman says. "I don't mean that in an arrogant way. We believe that great brands don't chase customers, customers chase great brands." While everybody was "screaming value," Restoration went the other direction. "In bad economic times," argues Friedman, "quality becomes even more important, uniqueness becomes even more important-people need to be inspired to buy something."
Another "then and now" look at the brand's wares. Photo: WSJ. Magazine.
With the shoeshine kits and "Aqua Trolls" (a lawn ornament that Friedman, upon joining the company in 2001, first took for Santa Claus; "now I'm half-Jewish, but I know Santa Claus") a distant memory, he now envisions Restoration as a kind of "open platform," an app store for home decor, where the likes of London furniture maker and antiques dealer Timothy Oulton and the Midwestern/Dutch pair of Mark Sage and Rudi Nijssen can craft new pieces out of old things, artisanal objects pitched somewhere between mall sameness and Design Center uniqueness. When I ask him what's left from the "old" Restoration Hardware, he stops to think. "There's a leather chair," he says, pausing as if searching for the right word, "that's evolved."
Read the rest of the piece tomorrow in WSJ. Magazine