Gold Standard

Was it possible to create furniture that could work as well for receiving guests as it did for watching movies in pajamas? Gold and Williams weren't sure -- that is, until they spotted slipcovers on some dining-room chairs at a show house in North Carolina. Soon, without testing the idea out on focus groups, Williams -- who is the company's director of design and executive VP, while Gold serves as president and CEO -- brought sofa slipcovers back to the world of furniture.

To Williams, removable covers seemed like a great innovation. Homeowners could change the look of their sofa from one season to another and back again. Gold and Williams promised to stockpile patterns for every slipcovered product they made, so that a customer could always call the company to order a replacement, no matter how old the original sofa might be.

It was a tough sell. The buyers who stocked the furniture retailers didn't take to the idea, despite Williams's attempt at high drama on the showroom floor. "Our showroom was so small that it couldn't hold that many sofas," he recalls. "So people would see one and walk to the back of the room to see the rest, and in the meantime, we'd be switching the cover on the one that they just saw. When the buyers would turn around to walk back, they'd do a double take when they realized what had happened."

Only one retailer placed an order for slipcovered sofas during the first season. But that company's sales were high enough that other companies gave in to the logic of replaceable slipcovers. In fact, over time, other manufacturers ripped off the look wholesale. Design wags even coined a term for the style, "shabby chic," which drove Gold up a wall. "Our furniture is not shabby," he insists. "It's so functional, and it's such a great way to live. Once you've had a slipcovered sofa, it's hard not to have one."

The numbers bear him out. While it costs between $400 and $600 to buy an extra set of slipcovers with the purchase of a sofa, about 15% of customers do it anyway. And that number has increased over the past few years: The company has about 30% more employees producing slipcovers than it did just two years ago. "Are slipcovers a fashion?" Gold asks. "There is such a thing as a timeless fashion -- white T-shirts, Levi's jeans, khakis. We're hoping that the slipcover will endure in the same way."

Although Gold and Williams continue to have great success with slipcovers, the two men are not one-hit wonders. In 1994, they were scouting flea markets in Paris when they spotted a couple of old leather club chairs. "I don't know who saw them first," Gold recalls. "But the minute we looked closely at them, we realized that they had a unique style. They could work equally well with traditional furniture and modern stuff. Bob sketched some ideas right there."

Here too, it was obvious how an antique club chair -- or a new chair made to look antique -- could fit into the lifestyles of the customers that Gold and Williams coveted. "We'd been seeing people in Mercedes station wagons pulling up to antique stores to buy chests of drawers," Gold recalls. "These were people who could afford to shop at Bloomingdale's, but they wanted stuff that already looked broken-in." Adds Williams: "We knew we were onto something when we noticed that the same shirt at J.Crew cost more if it had been prewashed or made to look as if it had already been worn."

This time, there was less resistance to the company's insights. Crate and Barrel immediately understood that a weathered leather club chair would be the next logical acquisition for people who wore prewashed jeans and leather bomber jackets. Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware soon lined up as well. This year, the Mitchell Gold Co. expects to sell close to 38,000 club chairs at an average price of $1,500 each.

Fast Furniture

If conventional furniture styles have been disappointing customers for many years, then the industry's standard operating procedure has left those customers downright desperate. Gold and Williams understood that people who would take naturally to their design sensibilities would also want a very different customer experience when shopping for furniture. Trying to improve how retailers sell and deliver their products has turned out to be a tougher job than designing appealing furniture. But the company has made progress by embracing some counterintuitive strategies.

One such strategy is to recognize that there are special challenges to manufacturing quality furniture and that even the most restless innovators can't wish those challenges away. For example, fabric is a big problem. "Most of the materials that our consumers want on their furniture are natural fibers like wool and cotton," says Gold. "Those fabrics take dye differently every time you use them, because there are all kinds of variables that can affect the way that they take the dye."