For many businesses, the effects of a change in key leadership may not be apparent for a few years. That’s true for Lloyd Flanders, as it has now been a little over two years since Dudley Flanders, the previous CEO, passed away and his daughter Jess Flanders took over the company.
Casual News Now checked in with the company to see how things have changed over the past two years, why it refreshed its brand and where the company is headed now that some form of normalcy may return to the outdoor industry next year.
Lloyd Flanders President Warren Juliano, who has been with the company in inside management roles since 2004, says that Jess coming on board in 2015 and Brian Echols joining as the senior vice president of sales in 2019 changed the company for the better. But that still didn’t make the transition any easier when Dudley passed.
“That was a tough blow for everybody,” Juliano says. “But Jess had already been on board in-house on the marketing side for a good seven so having her step into the CEO role has been refreshing. She’s bringing youth and inspiration, and she has a desire for the business that you just can’t teach, having been around the business her entire life.”
He says the leadership team is close, meeting every two weeks and continuously looking at long-term planning and investing back into the business with equipment, building improvements and more.
One of those investments was a refresh of the brand, which included a new logo, website and marketing materials ahead of the first Casual Market Atlanta.
“We’re not changing our core strategy, or what we’re about or who we’re servicing, but we thought it was important to update the brand, and what a better time to roll out that update than when we launched in Atlanta.”
He says the refresh was a project two years in the making, during which time Juliano says the company invested significantly in what it calls a product visualizer. This allows users to visit their website, click on any of the chairs and change the finish, fabric, designs and more.
“It is technology that has been around for a long time, but it’s a little bit more difficult to create with our product because it is woven wicker,” he says. “But we’re excited about how it came out.”
Atlanta market attendees received the refresh well, according to Juliano. He says in July, most of the company’s dealers had stock orders put together for them that are tentatively on hold until they sell down their inventory levels.
At Design Days, the designer-centric market that takes place in Atlanta in September, Juliano says Lloyd Flanders saw 40% of retailers that they did in July.
“I think the whole industry is still trying to figure it out,” Juliano says about the Design Days event. We have an ICFA planning meeting in October and I’m sure one of the topics will be about the September show — do we need to put more of an emphasis on September, or is it more of a quick little comeback if you didn’t get a chance to go or need to reconfirm what you saw in July after your inventory levels decrease.”
The designer presence for Lloyd Flanders at Design Days was about 10% of July’s traffic, which Juliano says they expected. And they were pleased with this because they saw new customers and wrote orders, which he says is not a usual thing to happen at the market itself anymore.
“I thought it was beneficial to be there,” he adds.
Going forward, Juliano explains that the company is trying to figure out what a normal year looks like after three outlier years and that the supply chain is back under control.
“During the supply chain issue, we saw a big increase in our domestic demand,” Juliano says. “We’ve always been one of the only domestic woven wicker manufacturers, but we typically saw our business be about 60% import product that we would do value added to when we got it here versus having 100% domestic during the supply chain. We saw that shift back and our domestic came up to about 55%, so it created some challenges and put us in a growth mode.”
He adds that this was a good thing because they have a lot of employees who have been here a long time, which means they’re going to retire soon. “To get new blood in here and pass on that tribal knowledge was important,” he says.
Unfortunately, the return to normalcy has to be transition — it can’t happen all at once. So once dealers work through their inventory, Juliano says the industry will start to see things normalize this next selling season, and next July will be more of a normal buying year for 2025.
“We are expecting to see it kind of stabilize, and we’re comparing 2023 to 2019 because we can’t really compare to 2021 or 2022,” he says.
With a refreshed reintroduction of its overseas assortment and new product on the way, Lloyd Flanders is giving the market time to stabilize and helping retailers work through inventory while continuously taking the temperature of the industry for next year.
“We’re going to continue to invest in our own operation to make ourselves more efficient and more cost-effective in all the things that we need to do,” Juliano concludes. “I think many in our industry have taken that approach.”
