June 2020 was an unprecedented month for casual furniture retailers. With stores re-opening after weeks and sometimes months of closure due to COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, and consumers re-emerging from their homes anxious to make changes to the spaces they’d occupied during quarantine, many retailers faced a surge in business they could barely handle.
And while that boost in demand this past summer allowed many stores to make up for lost sales from March and April, some outlets found it impossible to right the ship after so much downtime. One of those casualties was Great Gatherings, a 15-year-old chain of high-end outdoor furniture stores located in Maryland and Virginia.
The sudden demise of Great Gatherings was the second closing of a major casual furnishings chain in the area, after venerable retailer Offenbachers filed for bankruptcy in 2016.
That’s where Dave Cintorino and Alex Ikenson came in. The duo, owners of Home Escapes, which has sold spas and outdoor furniture in the D.C. metro for three decades, purchased the intellectual property and client lists of Offenbachers in 2017 and merged the brands to become Offenbachers Home Escapes.
“When we bought the intellectual property, we got a call from Carl’s (Offenbacher) wife saying she was really happy that we would be carrying on with his clients, and that she knew they would be taken care of,” said Cintorino.
And when Great Gatherings closed last year, Cintorino and Ikenson saw the opportunity to do what they did with Offenbachers—expand their own business while stepping up to service the defunct store’s existing clientele.
“We’ve gone to every vendor we carry that they also carry and said, ‘any warranty issues, we’ll help you fulfill for the customer,’” said Cintorino. “It’s a win-win all around.”
Making It Work
After acquiring the Offenbachers brand, Cintorino and Ikenson learned marrying two well-known names was a bit easier said than done. For one, Home Escapes mostly sold via custom orders while Offenbachers did most of its selling from inventory. Cintorino said Offenbachers Home Escapes now sells around 60% custom orders and 40% from inventory. With Great Gatherings, the transition was a bit easier, since the store operated similarly with a focus on custom orders.
And with chains like Offenbachers and Great Gatherings, which served multiple communities, Cintorino and Ikenson also had to decide where to open locations.
“We had two stores—one in Rockville, Maryland, and one in Herndon, Virginia, which is our flagship store where all of our offices are,” said Cintorino. “(Great Gatherings) had five stores and three of their stores were in areas that overlapped our two stores, so it didn’t make much sense to keep those stores.
“But they had a store in Annapolis, Maryland, that was one of their biggest grossing stores. We turned that around and opened it as Offenbachers. They also had a store in Gainesville, Virginia, that we decided to keep as Great Gatherings.”
Cintorino said they opted to keep the Great Gatherings name on the Gainesville location since that area was unfamiliar with Offenbachers, unlike Annapolis, which had previously been home to the outlet.
The Right People
Acquiring a brand and opening new stores during an ordinary year is a tall task, but to do so in the midst of a pandemic has been particularly challenging. But finding the right staff—including many employees from Great Gatherings such as former district manager Eric Stalzer—has helped make the process run much smoother.
“I don’t know if we could’ve opened two stores and taken on additional business without having high-quality, trained staff,” said Cintorino. “And Eric Stalzer was instrumental in that.
“We hired a bunch of people who knew the business, and the two stores that we opened really were ready to go—we just walked in and started selling. I don’t know that we couldn’t have done two build-outs with everything we had going on.”
And they had plenty going on. Once the stores reopened after COVID-19 lockdown restrictions were relaxed, Offenbachers and Great Gatherings were inundated with customers looking to revamp their outdoor spaces.
“By the end of June, we couldn’t answer the phone enough,” said Cintorino. “We could put five people on the phones, and we wouldn’t be able to get back to everybody. Everybody was working at 120% capacity.”
Cintorino said they’re preparing for another robust season, bulking up inventory to meet the demand. And while they are ready to serve new customers this season, the business continues to build relationships with Great Gatherings customers.
“We’re a different company, but we have every intention of carrying on the Great Gatherings brand and helping their former customers,” said Cintorino. “If you came to me and said, ‘one of the welds broke on my chair,’ I don’t say, ‘sorry, you’re out of luck.’ I can look up their records and see it’s still under warranty, or if they got burned monetarily, I try to help. We’re just making that as smooth a transition as possible.”
