Family oriented

Location. Location. Location.

It's as important for furniture stores as it is for real estate. For Martha and R. Byron Brown III, being in the right place has kept their chain of La-Z-Boy stores successful despite the recession.

They have seven stores in six cities in the Southeast. The company headquarters is in Evans at their store in Mullins Crossing on Washington Road.

Tipperary Sales Inc. is a family business named for a county in Ireland that was home to a great-grandfather. While the sister-brother team are at the helm, the business involves other members of the family who aren't directly associated with the furniture retail company.

"Working with family can be a challenge, but it can also be a great blessing. For me, it's a great blessing," Byron said. "We're a close family."

People ask how the family makes it work. "We love each other. Nobody's greedy."

Having grown up in the furniture business, working with their father in South Carolina, neither Martha nor Byron thought they would choose the business as a career.

"This is an intense business. You've got to stay on top of every detail," Byron said.

Tipperary Sales has 120 employees spread throughout its La-Z-Boy stores.

The galleries today are no longer the lines of chairs, but 15,000 square feet of living room and dining room vignettes. The current generation of stores calls for a degree-holding interior designer to be on staff.

"We do whole homes, we do rooms, we sell single chairs, whatever the customer needs," Byron said.

Being in three states and six cities makes it challenging to operate.

"You have to do things six times often," Byron explained.

Their semiannual furniture trade-in promotion, for example, is conducted simultaneously in the six cities. Customers can get a discount if they turn in gently used furniture, which is then donated to charities.

Martha is the great communicator of the company, Byron said.

She wears a lot of hats at Tipperary, overseeing design, communications and customer service.

"One of her greatest strengths is that she's a great relationship builder," Byron said.

Byron has an understanding of business, economics and accounting, Martha said.

"He is able to look at numbers and tell you where issues are and how best to address them," she said.

Martha said her brother has a sixth sense about starting and running stores in different economic environments, as did their father, R. Byron Brown Jr., who has retired from the furniture business and lives in the family's native Sumter, S.C.

The company's original La-Z-Boy store is in Columbia. After establishing that outlet in the early 1970s, the company spread to Augusta; Charleston, Spartanburg and Greenville in South Carolina and Charlotte, N.C.

"For almost this entire decade, we've been in the process of relocating or redoing stores. That takes a lot of work. It can take three years to find the correct location. It is critical to be in the right spot," Byron said. "We start early enough so that we can take our time."

Furniture roots

The Brown family's connection with the furniture business starts with R. Byron Brown Sr., who worked in saw mills during the Great Depression.

"So, our dad grew up around processing timber. After World War II, he finished his college at the University of Michigan; received basically what was an engineering degree in wood processing," Byron said.

Byron Brown Jr. went into furniture manufacturing and then switched to furniture retail in the early 1950s. The family had settled in Sumter, S.C., by then.

"After the war, there was a tremendous amount of timber being processed for the construction of homes. Subsequently, there was a lot of furniture being manufactured for those homes," Byron said. "He went to work for a furniture manufacturer in Sumter called Williams Furniture."

In 1967, Byron and Martha's father opened an Ethan Allen gallery in South Carolina's capital city. He opened an Ethan Allen store in Augusta in 1972.

Byron's first encounter with Augusta was helping set up that store during his junior year at the University of South Carolina. Because it was a family business, when the kids weren't in school, they were at work at the furniture store with their father.

Byron graduated in 1974 with a degree in economics. He had no interest in staying in the family business while going to college.

"Economics is not the easy way through business school. If you get it, it is something you enjoy. And I got it," Byron said. "I didn't know what I was going to do, but I wanted to pursue a career in economics."

He was running the warehouse in Columbia and worked part-time on the sales floor. His change of heart about staying in the family business was sudden. He moved to Augusta in 1974 to run the Ethan Allen store. He married his college sweetheart, Melanie, a year later.

"Dad read an article in the early '70s that La-Z-Boy was going to start opening stores that were solely devoted to selling their product," Byron said. Up until then, La-Z-Boy was sold in general stores.

The first Brown-operated La-Z-Boy opened in Columbia in 1976. Two years later, a La-Z-Boy store came to Augusta, on Gordon Highway near Regency Mall.

"Back then, all La-Z-Boy made were recliners. The stores were about 3,000 square feet and we had 100 or so recliners lined up in rows," Byron said.

"It was a stunning display," Martha added. "It's come a long way."

Tipperary opened in Macon, Ga., in 1981. That store was closed later because it was too difficult to serve in the distribution network.

Tipperary ran the Ethan Allen and La-Z-Boy stores until 1987, when Byron Brown Jr. decided to retire. That resulted in the closure of the Ethan Allen stores, but his children continued to run the La-Z-Boys.

"In 1987, La-Z-Boy came to us and asked us to take over the Charleston market," Byron said. "By then, we were in a third generation of stores. They started making sofas ... that was the time that we began to display more vignette settings."

La-Z-Boy invited Tipperary to take over existing stores in other markets in the 1990s: Greenville, Spartanburg and Charlotte.

"That put us in the major cities that we're in today," he said. "The powerhouse cities in the Southeast seemed to be along I-85."

Martha joined the company in much the same fashion as Byron. She grew up working in the family business but didn't want to make it her career while in college. She obtained a degree in English in 1988 from Columbia College.

"I wasn't going to go into the business, either," she explained. "I was going to be a copy writer."

It was after graduation that she woke up with an epiphany -- "divine" intervention, she calls it -- and listened to the voice in her head that told her to call her brother.

People tell her that she didn't get to make use of her degree.

"But I make use of it every day," she said.

She is the chief communicator for the company. She is also the baby of the family -- named after her mother, by the way. so the naming lines continue paternally and maternally.

"I was 14 years old when she was born," Byron said. "I helped raise her. When we had our first child, my wife asked, 'What do we do?' I said, 'I know what to do.' "

The middle sibling, Charlotte, is 10 years older than Martha.

"I grew up with three sets of parents. ... It wasn't easy being the baby," Martha said.

Charlotte's husband, Mike Floyd, is also a partner in the business. He runs the distribution system in Rock Hill, S.C. Their son assists the company with financial planning.

Byron's daughter, Lauren, works for a public relations firm in Atlanta that has a contract with Tipperary. Byron's son, Byron IV, is in commercial real estate in Charlotte and has helped in the search for new store locations.

"As we've grown, we've need those additional specialties. We're not a large enough company to support those positions in-house," Byron said.

Finding room

Some of that expertise is coming into play now. The company has been working for years to find another spot in Charlotte, its third store there.

The company already closed a store in that city, not because of the economy but because the customer base had moved away from the city center.

"A city like Charlotte grows in rings. The neighborhood around that store had declined. When our lease ran out, we closed it," Byron said. "We're looking to go to the southeast side of Charlotte, but there is no retail development out there yet ... One thing that doesn't work well in this industry is to be a pioneer."

That applies to Augusta. The first La-Z-Boy store was opened on Gordon Highway. It was relocated to Wrightsboro Road in the 1990s. The move to Columbia County came in 2006.

"We knew we needed to come out here, but there wasn't any established retail area in Evans. We had to wait a few years," Byron said. It wasn't until Mullins Crossing was built that they felt it was time to relocate.

"We still are very regional," Martha said. "We serve Aiken and North Augusta and the communities along I-20 heading toward Atlanta."

"Know your customer and stay where they shop," Byron said.

Trade-ins

Rick Herring at Augusta Urban Ministries relies on La-Z-Boy for about 20 percent of the furniture that the outreach program uses to help the homeless.

Twice a year, the furniture store conducts a trade-in sale to collect gently used furniture to help the charity, and charities in other cities.

"A lot of the partners are Christian outreach organizations," Martha said. "The ones that we picked are the ones that really took seriously the addicted homeless."

The business assists Oliver Gospel Mission in Columbia; Miracle Hill in upstate South Carolina and Assistance League in Charlotte.

Some of the charities sell the furniture in their thrift shops to help finance their outreach programs. Others, such as Augusta Urban Ministries, give the furniture to clients. It goes to the transition homes. When a family leaves the home for permanent housing, they take the furniture with them. Then the transition home is empty again, and that's where the donations from La-Z-Boy customers come into play.

"Our customers want to help, they understand gently used. It is going to be used in someone else's home. And we usually get good product," Martha explained.

"The warehouse and delivery teams, it doubles their work," Byron said.

Keeping furniture out of landfills makes the program environmentally friendly, he added.

"It is all handled at our expense. There is no charge back to the charity," Byron said. That costs about $1,400 per trailer load. Since starting the program three years ago, the company has taken in 16 trailer loads for charity.

They also assist Ronald McDonald Houses.

"La-Z-Boy has an agreement to furnish the living areas of all Ronald McDonald Houses across North America," Byron said. The local stores will do the delivery for whatever is chosen by the houses.

Byron said the company assists the arts, sponsoring Westobou, for example, and playing host to the symphony's new conductor.

"They are pretty humble people, that's the main thing I see about them," Mr. Herring said. "They have a real servant's heart and they go about this quietly."

Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352 or timothy.rausch@augustachronicle.com.

SPECIAL
La-Z-Boy delivered a truckload of furniture to Augusta Urban Ministries in July. The Evans store conducts semiannual sales to get their customers to donate their used furniture to assist the Augusta charity, something the business has been doing for the past three years. [CAPTION]

RAINIER EHRHARDT/STAFF
Furniture is put in homelike groupings at the La-Z-Boy store in Mullins Crossing on Washington Road in Evans. This is also the headquarters for Tipperary Sales Inc., which operates stores in six cities. [CAPTION]

RAINIER EHRHARDT/STAFF
Design consultant Terry Simons (left) helps Vickye Rayburn choose sofa colors at the La-Z-Boy store in Evans. [CAPTION]

Byron and Martha Brown pose for a portrait at their La-Z-Boy store, Monday, Oct. 12, 2009, in Evans, Ga. RAINIER EHRHARDT/STAFF