Lorell Website Re-Fresh & Virtual Reality Showroom
“We are excited to announce the re-launch of the Lorell Furniture website. The website boasts a clean design with an intuitive and consistent site-wide navigation system with improved menu functionality. It is fully responsive with mobile devices, making it easy to navigate on your portable devices. The Lorell Furniture website allows customers to review all Lorell products, literature, and branded resources from one great location.
Our new website provides a clear message of who we are and what we stand for, great product at a great price which creates what works for you. The new Lorell Furniture website features a range of new content, such as fabric and finish cards, brochures, flyers, our new Lorell Virtual Reality Showroom and much more. Going forward, we will continue to add more content and product information to provide you with all of the information you need to evaluate our products and services from Lorell.
We’re really pleased with the new website and feel it will create the experience you’re looking for when you visit our site. Check out the new website here: www.LorellFurniture.com.
Did you catch that we mentioned the introduction of our new Lorell Virtual Reality Showroom? As an added treat to the Lorell Furniture website, we are pleased to introduce the Lorell Virtual Reality showroom designed by KITS Collaborator in partnership with Yulio. The Lorell Virtual Reality Showroom revolutionizes the way customers engage purchasing furniture. Customers are able to explore new and existing product and their environmental context in real-time. The VR application provides an immersive and responsive product experience. It empowers the visitor to visualize their office space and expand their mind with new ideas to configurations and product placement.
Crafted in and composed of high resolution photorealistic 3D-renderings, the application provides a captivating 360º stereoscopic showroom experience with brilliant product staging. Grab a pair of smart glasses or your laptop and begin the journey into the Lorell Virtual Reality Showroom. We bring products to life and enable users to look at the products in their true environment. The visual and relative representation helps customers in the layout and decision-making process. As you tour the showroom, you will also see typical layouts that can be found in the KITS Collaborator Lorell library. You can layout the same configurations found in the VR Showroom in your customers environment with the KITS program. For more information, visit www.SPRFurniture.com.
Virtual Reality Showroom: http://bit.ly/LorellVRShowroom
Need help navigating the Lorell Virtual Reality Showroom? Check out the demo here: http://bit.ly/LorellVRdemo.
Tariff Update
Everyone is discussing China tariffs, but how do they impact the furniture category and how do they impact furniture at S.P. Richards? Furniture was fortunate with the first two tariff lists because the original List 1 and 2 did not have any furniture items subject to tariffs. That all changed with list 3, which included almost the entire furniture category.
The first tariff was 10% on the imported value of the cost of an item from China. Most furniture manufacturers passed along the tariff increase in their January 1 pricing updates. The majority of all furniture items were impacted - from imports in a box directly from China to domestically produced items that use components imported from China. This first wave of cost increases bumped costs up ranging from 1% to 10%, with the average increase close to 7%.
The second tariff increase on these items was 15% and took effect in June, bringing the total tariff impact to 25%. Again, almost all manufactures were affected, and the average price increase for this round of tariffs was 12%.
How does this impact S.P. Richards’s furniture? For the July 1 price files, you will see tariff price increases from the majority of furniture vendors. These increases range from 1.9% to 15% based on content from China. These increases were kept separate from any other price increases, so when and if the tariffs are removed, we can reduce the costs accordingly.
How was Lorell impacted by the tariff increases? No vendor was immune from the impact of tariffs, but over the past few years, Lorell took steps to mitigate dependence on Chinese imports. Currently, approximately 30% of Lorell sales are generated from items imported directly from China. Also, over the last several years, Lorell started a major initiative to move sourcing to the United States and North America, and when that option was not available, our sourcing group looked at alternative countries for sources.
What’s not impacted?
• No increases on a vast majority of our steel products under the Lorell Fortress brand including vertical and lateral files
(They are made in either the U.S. or North America)
• No increases on Lorell chairmats, including the new glass chairmats
• No increases on Prominence 2.0 setup laminate casegoods manufactured in Canada
• No increases on veneer bookcases
• No increases on our top two selling chair series (86200 Ergomesh and Conjure seating series) as well as other popular chair series
• No increases on the Lorell sit/stand bases (Although most vendors import their sit/stand bases from China, we source our
bases from a premium manufacturer in Europe)
• Small increase on Lorell MIA (some sourced components but made in the U.S. so the increase was minimal)
• No increases on our top-selling Essentials laminate series
Unfortunately, items imported from China and not listed above, will have an increase of 10% to 12% effective July 1. Our expectation is that the tariff issue will be resolved and we will be able to eliminate the tariff increases accordingly. In the meantime, because of the initiatives taken over the last several years, we have been able to minimize the impact of these tariffs on Lorell.
USA Seating Product Enhancement Relaunch
Check out the presentation here: https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3A4a997163-2e5c-4363-9021-f58a4a1b2911
Great information on new packaging and shipping features.