🛋There's Disruption Afoot in the Furniture Space🛋

Add Furniture to the List of Disrupted Categories (Home Heritage Group Inc. Filed for Bankruptcy)

“New Chapter 11 Filing!” Or is it technically a Chapter 22? 🤔

We know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “this filed a few days ago and I’ve already read all about it.” You may have read something about it, but not like this. Bear with us…

Home Heritage Group Inc. (“HHG”) is a North Carolina-based designer and manufacturer of home furnishings; it sells product via (i) retail stores, (ii) interior design partners, (iii) multi-line/independent retailers, and (iv) mass merchant stores.” In addition, the company has an international wholesale business.

Why do we mention Chapter 22? For the uninitiated, Chapter 22 in bankruptcy doesn’t actually exist. It is a somewhat snarky term to describe companies that have round-tripped back into chapter 11 after a previous stint in bankruptcy court. That, to some degree, is the case here.

WAAAAAAAY back in November 2013, KPS Capital Partners LP formed the newly bankrupt HHG entity to acquire a brand portfolio and related assets out of the bankruptcy estate of Furniture Brands International Inc. (“FBI”). FBI had been, in the early 2000s, a very successful purveyor of various furniture brands — to the tune of $2b in annual sales. But in the 12 months prior to the acquisition, the company’s sales were down to $940mm and, more importantly, its EBITDA was negative $58mm. At the time of filing, it had $142mm in total funded debt outstanding, $200mm in unfunded pension obligations and another $100mm in general trade obligations.

Given this debt, a decline in sales at the time was devastating. The company noted in its court filings on September 9, 2013 (Docket #16):

As a manufacturer and retail of home furnishings, Furniture Brands’ operations and performance depend significantly on economic conditions, particularly in the United States, and their impact on levels of existing home sales, new home construction, and consumer discretionary spending. Economic conditions deteriorated significantly in the United States and worldwide in recent years as part of a global financial crisis. Although the general economy has begun to recover, sales of residential furniture remain depressed due to wavering consumer confidence and several, ongoing global economic factors that have negatively impacted consumers’ discretionary spending. These ongoing factors include lower home values, prolonged foreclosure activity throughout the country, a weak market for home sales, continued high levels of unemployment, and reduced access to consumer credit. These conditions have resulted in a decline in Furniture Brands’ sales, earnings and liquidity.

Sales have continued to be depressed as a result of a sluggish recovery in the U.S. economy, continuing high unemployment, depressed housing prices, tight consumer lending practices, the reluctance of some households to use available credit for big ticket purchases including furniture, and continuing volatility in the retail market.

PETITION Note: My, how things have changed. Just reflect on that synopsis of the economy a mere five years ago. The company also noted that:

…some of the Company’s larger brands have lost some of their market share primarily due to competition from suppliers who are able to produce similar products at lower costs. The residential furniture industry is highly competitive and fragmented. Furniture Brands competes with many other manufacturers and retailers, some of which offer widely advertised, well-known, branded products, and other competitors are large retail furniture dealers who offer their own store-branded products.

All of these factors stormed together to constrain the company’s liquidity and force a chapter 11 filing and eventual sale. KPS purchased several of the FBI brands for $280mm (subject to working capital adjustments), including Thomasville, Broyhill, Lane, Drexel Heritage, Henredon, Pearson, Hickory Chair, Lane Venture, and Maitland-Smith. In other words: brands that your grandfather would know and you would shrug at the mere mention of. Well, some of you anyway.

Fast forward five years and the successor entity HHG has $280mm of debt and…you guessed it…severe liquidity constraints. In its first day filing papers, HHG notes that the previous bankruptcy continues to have lasting effects on its business; it highlights:

Following years of sales declines, many furniture retailers had lost faith in the ability of the Company to produce, deliver, and service its products, and the bankruptcy led many of them to shift their purchases to a variety of competitors or even further utilize their own private label offerings.

This is what people still nostalgically refer to as “bankruptcy stigma.” Indeed, it still exists. The company continued:

In addition, the Company’s operations and performance depend significantly on economic conditions, particularly in the United States, and their impact on levels of existing home sales, new home construction, and consumer discretionary spending. Although economic conditions have been steadily improving in recent years, the Debtors have struggled to adjust to certain shifts in consumer lifestyles, which include: (i) lower home-ownership levels and more people renting; (ii) more apartment living and single-person households; (iii) older consumers that want to age in place; and (iv) cash-strapped millennials that are slow in forming households relative to prior generations.

Haha! The poor millennials. Apparently an entire generation is “cash-strapped” and prefers to sleep in a tent under their WeWork desks. Blame the avocado toast and turmeric lattes. But, wait, there’s more:

Consumer browsing and buying practices are rapidly shifting as well toward greater use of social media, internet- and app-based catalogs and e-commerce platforms, and the Company has been unable to develop a substantial sales base for its brands through this key growth channel.

Furthermore, the residential furniture industry is highly competitive and fragmented. The Company competes with many other manufacturers and retailers, some of which offer widely advertised, well-known, branded products, and other competitors are large retail furniture dealers who offer their own private label products. This competitive landscape has proved challenging for some of the Company’s larger brands as well-capitalized competitors continue to gain market share at the expense of the Debtors. (emphasis added)

PETITION Note: My, how things have remained the same. Sound familiar? Have to hand it to the professionals here: why reinvent the wheel when you can just crib from the prior filing? We guess being a repeat customer in bankruptcy has its benefits!! Chapter 22!!!

<p>Meanwhile a short digression relevant to those last two quoted paragraphs. According to Statista, worldwide online furniture and homewares sales are expected to be close to $190 billion. Take a look at this chart:

RetailDive notes:

E-commerce furniture sales have emerged as a major growth area, rising 18% in 2015, second only to grocery, according to research from Barclays.

Accordingly, GartnerL2 cautions that:

…home brands now have an outsized onus to produce best-in-class product pages for the influx of online shoppers. However, many brands have failed to deliver and aren’t keeping pace with industry disruptors.

Sounds like HHG has, admittedly, fallen into this category.

GartnerL2 highlights the disparate user experiences offered by Williams-Sonoma-owned West Elm and Chicago-based DTC disruptor Interior Define, which was founded in 2013 and has raised $27mm in funding (most recently a Series B in March). The latter offers extensive imagery, a visual guide and an augmented reality mobile app. All of these things appeal to the more-tech-savvy (non-cash-strapped??) millennial buyer.

And that is precisely the demographic that La-Z-Boy Incorporated ($LZB) is going after with its purchase of Joybird, a California-based direct-to-consumer e-commerce retailer and manufacturer of upholstered furniture. Founded in 2014, its $55mm in reported revenue last year took a chunk out of, well, someone. Other players in that space include Burrow ($19.2mm in total funding; most recent Series A in March from New Enterprise Associates) and, of course, Amazon’s in-house furniture brands, Rivet and Stone & Beam. <p><end>

All of these factors resulted in continual YOY declines in sales and a liquidity squeeze. Now, therefore, the company is in bankruptcy to effectuate a sale — or sales — of its brands to prospective bidders. It has one purchaser in line for the “Luxury Group” and, according to the court filing, appears close to an agreement with a stalking horse buyer of the Broyhill and Thomasville & Co. properties. In the meantime, the company has a commitment from prepetition lender PNC Bank NA for a $98mm DIP, of which $25mm Judge Gross granted on an interim basis.

Footwear Brands Reap Heaps of VC Investment (Short B&M Footwear Retailers)

Back in March, in “Nine West & the Brand-Based DTC Megatrend,” we noted the following:

The Walking Company. Payless Shoesource. Aerosoles. The bankruptcy court dockets have been replete with third-party sellers of footwear with bursting brick-and-mortar footprints, high leverage, scant consumer data, old stodgy reputations and, realistically speaking, limited brand value. Mere days away from a Nine West bankruptcy filing, we can’t help but to think about how quickly the retail landscape is changing and the impact of brands. Why? Presumably, Nine West will file, close the majority of - if not all of - its brick-and-mortar stores and transfer its brand IP to its creditors (or a new buyer). For whatever its brand is worth. We suppose the company’s lenders - likely to receive the company’s IP in a debt-for-equity swap, will soon find out. We suspect “not a hell of a whole lot”.

Shortly thereafter, Nine West did file for bankruptcy but we were a little off on the rest. That is, unless $340mm constitutes “not a hell of a whole lot.” That amount, landed on after a competitive bidding process, resulted in a greater-than-expected value to Nine West’s estate. Remember: the company filed for bankruptcy with a stalking horse bidder offering “approximately $200 million (inclusive of the above-stated $123 million allocation to IP, subject to adjustment).” This is where bankruptcy functions as a bit of alternative reality: $340 million is a good result for a company with $1.6 billion of debt, exclusive of any and all trade debt — particularly when the opening bid is meaningfully lower. For a more fulsome refresher on Nine West’s bankruptcy filing, go here.

Subsequent to Nine West’s filing, the tombstones for footwear retailers continued to pile up. For instance, in mid-May, The Rockport Company LLC filed for bankruptcy with a telling narrative. We highlighted:

The company notes, "[o]ver the last several years the Debtors have faced a highly promotional and competitive retail environment, underscored by a shift in customer preference for online shopping." And it notes further, "[t]he unfavorable performance of the Acquired Stores in the current retail environment has made it difficult for the Debtors to maintain sufficient liquidity and to operate their business outside of Chapter 11." PETITION NOTE: This is like a broken record, already.

We continued:

In light of this, armed with a $20 million new-money DIP credit facility (exclusive of rollup amounts) extended by its prepetition ABL lenders, the company has filed for bankruptcy to consummate a stalking horse-backed asset purchase agreement with CB Marathon Opco, LLC an affiliate of Charlesbank Equity Fund IX, Limited Partnership for the sale of the company's assets - OTHER THAN its North American assets — for, among other things, $150 million in cash. The buyer has a 25-day option to continue considering whether to purchase the North American assets but the company does "not expect there to be any significant interest in the North American Retail Assets." Read: the stores. The company, therefore, also filed a "store closing motion" so that it can expeditiously move to shutter its brick-and-mortar footprint at the expiration of the option. Ah, retail. 

And, ah, footwear. Check out this lineup:

And so we asked:

Given all of that, would you want Rockport’s brick-and-mortar business?

Answer: no. Apparently nobody did. And, in fact, nobody — other than the stalking horse, CB Marathon Opco, LLC — wanted any part of Rockport’s business.

On July 6, the company filed a notice that it cancelled its proposed auction. There were no qualified bidders, it noted, thereby making CB Marathon Opco, LLC the winning bidder by default. And given that the stalking horse agreement excluded the U.S. brick-and-mortar assets, those assets are now officially kaput. A hearing at which the bankruptcy court will bless the sale is scheduled for July 16. Aside from some additional administrative matters in the case, that hearing will mark a wretched ending for a company founded in the early 1970s.

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Juxtapose that doom and gloom with this Techcrunch piece about the rise of venture capital in footwear:

Over the past year-and-a-half, investors have tied up roughly $170 million in an assortment of shoe-related startups, according to an analysis of Crunchbase data. The vast majority is going to sellers and designers of footwear that people might actually want to walk in.

Top funding recipients are a varied bunch, including everything from used sneaker marketplaces to high-end designers to toddler play shoes. Startups are also experimenting with little-used materials, turning used plastic bottles, merino wool and other substances into chic wearables.

The piece continues:

It should be noted that recent footwear funding activity comes on the heels of some positive developments for the shoe industry.

Positive developments huh? “Some” must be the operative word given the preface above. There’s more:

First, this is a huge and growing industry. One recent report pegged the global footwear market at $246 billion in 2017, with annual growth rates of around 4.5 percent.

Second, public markets are strong. Shares of the world’s most valuable footwear company — Nike — have climbed more than 50 percent over the past nine months to reach a market cap of nearly $130 billion. Stocks of several smaller rivals, including Adidas, have also performed well.

Third, men are spending more on footwear. Though they’ve long been stereotyped as the gender with more restrained shoe-buying habits, men are putting more money into footwear and could be on track to close the spending gap.

And:

…one other bullish sneaker trend footwear analysts point to is the changing buying habits of women. Driven perhaps by a desire to walk more than a few blocks without being in pain, we’re buying fewer high heels and more sneakers.

The piece goes on to list a lineup of well-funded footwear companies. In marketplaces, GOAT and StockX. In streetwear, Stadium Goods. For children, Super Heroic. For comfort, Allbirds, Rothy’s, and Birdies. And the article neglected to mention Koio, Greats, and M. Gemi, to name a few. If you feel as if these names are unfamiliar because you didn’t see them at a brick-and-mortar footwear retailer in your last trip to the mall, well…yeah. That ought to explain a lot.

Interestingly, before unironically asking (and not entirely answering) whether any of these companies actually make money, the article also highlights Tamara Mellon,“a two-year-old brand that has raised more than $40 million to scale up a shoe design portfolio that runs the gamut from flats to spike heels.” Indeed, the company recently raised a $24mm Series B round* to grow its Italian-made pureplay e-commerce direct-to-consumer brand. In reality, though, Tamara Mellon is only technically two years old. It was around before 2016. In a different iteration. That iteration filed for bankruptcy.

In early 2016, Tamara Mellon Brand LLC filed for bankruptcy because of a liquidity crisis. And it couldn’t sufficiently raise capital outside of a chapter 11 filing to ensure its survival. After filing for bankruptcy, the company took on a $2mm debtor-in-possession credit facility from Ms. Mellon and, after combatting an equityholder-led “recharacterization”** challenge (paywall), swapped its term loan debt into equity. Winning prepetition equityholders like Ms. Mellon and venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA) came out with 16 and 31.1 percent of the equity, respectively. In turn, NEA capitalized the company to the tune of approximately $12mm.

Which highlights the obvious: not all of these companies will ultimately have renowned founders who merit second chances. A number of these high-flying e-commerce upstarts will fail; some of them will file for bankruptcy. The question is: as the funding rounds pour in from venture capitalists looking for the next big exit, how many other brands and shoe retailers will they push into bankruptcy first?

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*In October 2017, we wrote the following in “Sophia Amoruso's Nasty Gal Failure = Trite Lessons (Short Puffery)”:

We love how entrepreneurs are all about "move fast and break things" and "don't be afraid to fail" but then when they do, and do so badly, there is barely anything that really provides an in-depth post-mortem…Take, for instance, this piece of puffy garbage about Sophia Amoruso, which purports to inform readers about what Ms. Amoruso learned from Nasty Gal's rapid decline into bankruptcy. Instead it provides some evergreen inspirational advice that applies to virtually...well...everything and anything. TOTALLY USELESS.  

Apropos, the above-cited Fast Company piece is lip service Exhibit B. The piece notes:

Tamara Mellon cofounded Jimmy Choo with, well, Jimmy himself back in 1996. But in 2016, she decided to launch her own eponymous luxury shoe brand. It wasn’t easy, though: When she tried to go to high-end factories in Italy, she discovered that many refused to work with her, citing non-compete clauses with the Jimmy Choo brand.

But through persistence, she prevailed, and found factories that made shoes for other luxury brands.

We gather that what happened earlier in 2016 wasn’t relevant to the PR piece. Curious: is “persistence” a new euphemism for “bankruptcy”?

**If we understand what happened here correctly, other existing equityholders tried to recharacterize Ms. Mellon’s term loan holding as equity, effectively squashing her priority secured claim and demoting that claim to equal to or less than the equityholders’ claims. If successful, Ms. Mellon would not have been able to swap her debt for equity. Moreover, the other equityholders would have had a greater chance of a recovery on their claims. They failed, presumably recovering bupkis.