Eads Bros. Co. Weathers 103 Years of Business

One of the state’s oldest companies, Eads Bros. Furniture Co. of Fort Smith, has withstood fire, flood, high winds and the Arkansas River Valley economy for 103 years.

The firm’s owners said its survival, if not its success in a small-margin industry, has come from adaptability, savvy forcasting, strong family ties and maybe even a little dumb luck.

Eads Bros. started as a retail store and wholesale distributor in 1901 by brothers Charles and Lewis Eads. It now generates $5.5 million to $6 million in annual revenue and supplies about 250 small- to medium-sized retail furniture stores in five states with everything from mattresses and box springs to dinette sets. The products are made anywhere from China to the back room of Eads’ own facility.

Bill Eads III, great grandson of Charles and the firm’s present day president, said the company got out of the retail business in the 1950s to focus on the wholesale distributor segment.

“We probably didn’t go a hundred miles out of Fort Smith,” Eads said. “Over the years, our territory’s gotten bigger and bigger.”

Eads Bros. Furniture now serves about a 400-mile radius around Fort Smith in portions of Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, Eads said. The company employs about 30 people and has three delivery trucks.

Furniture Forecasters

Eads Bros. main business has always been in wholesale distribution. Eads said he purchases truckloads of furniture from manufactures, domestic or abroad. He stores it in his 100,000-SF warehouse until the sales staff sells pieces to various retail customers.

His customers are “small- to medium-sized retailers,” mostly furniture stores that have two to three locations. He said in the past there were a large number of “mom and pop” furniture and appliance stores that were on virtually every small town’s Main Street. But those stores have dwindled over the years, and he’s had to become more aggressive at marketing to larger retailers.

In the early 1960s, the company began to manufacture upholstered furniture under a division it called Circle E. The division lasted until about 1980, Eads said. Then in about 1989, the company jumped back into the manufacturing business by making beds.

Sleep Dynamics, the bedding division, manufactures mattresses and box springs units. Eads said at full capacity, the company can produce about 180 units, or about 90 mattress and box spring sets, a day — up to 450 a week.

Eads said the bedding division does a “fair amount” of contract business with hotels, motels and nursing homes, but he’s always looking for more.

“It makes it easier for a retailer to buy his bedroom furniture and his bedding from the same guy and get it on the same truck,” Eads said.

In about 1994, the company started importing furniture directly from China within another division called Royal Dynamics. “That’s probably the biggest part of our business today,” Eads said.

Eads said over the years he saw many of his suppliers closing their domestic plants and begin importing their goods, so he felt compelled to do the same.

“We really did it as a way to stay competitive,” Eads said. “I don’t necessarily like it. I’d just as soon buy it from a domestic manufacturer … You can’t do it any more.”

The company buys about 150 semi-truck-sized containers from afar each year. Every container is full of the identical items. One he received recently was full of 25 identical bedroom suits.

“With containers, you’ve got to forecast out several months in advance because you’ve got to allow for production time at the factory,” he said. “Then you’ve got to allow 30 days for shipping time.”

And at this time of the year, he said, it can take even longer than 30 days to get a shipment from the time it leaves the production facility.

Forecasting items can be tricky. Eads has to predict what consumers in his territory will want to buy up to four months ahead of time, but he’s not timid.

“You try and go by [sales] history,” he said. “If you like the suit and think it’s sellable, you buy … It’s like anybody, sometimes you make the wrong decision on something and you close it out and get rid of it.”

Eads said he’s particularly strong in the bedroom group segment of furniture, warehousing about 15 different styles of suits.

Steve Williams is owner of Homstead Rental and Furniture Warehouse in Manhattan, Kan. He has been buying furniture from Eads Bros. for about 18 years.

“They’re my warehouse,” he said.

Williams said he gets timely deliveries from Eads and that they extended his business credit at a tough time in the furniture industry, helping him get around some rough spots.

He sells Serta bedding products right beside Eads’ Sleep Dynamics and said, “I do very well with their bedding line.”

Eads is excited about an upcoming opportunity he’s got with an importer from Virginia. The importer has designed a series of exclusive bedroom suits he will sell to only a few distributors in non-competing markets, Eads said.

“I like that idea, because it’ll help me to sell those.”

Eads thinks most companies in the furniture industry are really becoming more like importers. He said that’s just the way his industry is moving.

The company purchases spring components for its bedding segment from a U.S. manufacturer, but he said the next step in staying competitive may be to import those as well.

“The spring unit is the biggest cost item that you have in the mattress,” he said.

The units are made of steel. Eads said he’s seen the price jump about 30 percent in the last year, because of the nationwide shortage of steel.

He said he’s seen a small increase in his foam, which is derived from petroleum products, too.

Catastrophe of ’96

On Sunday, April 21, 1996, an F3 tornado roared through parts of Fort Smith and Van Buren, killing two people and causing millions of dollars of damage.

The original four-story Eads Bros. location at 414 Garrison Ave. was hit hard. The building’s front windows were shattered and the interior inventory was tossed about. Eads said the water pipe that fed the building’s sprinkler system from the fourth floor was broken. Through roof damage, rain and the broken water main, the building was basically flooded from top to bottom, he said.

At that time the company had a 60,000-SF warehouse six blocks north. That building was hit by the tornado, too, sustaining even more damage than the downtown location.

Eads said the city wouldn’t allow businesses back downtown until buildings were determined to be safe, so the Eadses spent all day cleaning up the damage to the warehouse and securing whatever inventory they could.

On Wednesday afternoon of the same week, he met an insurance adjuster at the site and took the freight elevator up to the fourth floor. From there, the two climbed up to the roof to survey the damage. Suddenly they noticed billowing black smoke from the front of the building.

“For some reason my instinct told me to go back into the building,” he said.

There was a fire escape on the building’s backside, close to where the pair had been standing, but upon reflection, Eads said he’s not sure they could have made it to the escape because of the damage to the roof.

He said they went down the stairs and almost made it to the second floor before the smoke was too thick to muddle through. They turned back up to the third floor, made it to the fire escape and out to safety.

The facility was built in 1897 and had oak floors.

“Once it got started, there was just no putting it out,” he said. “Buildings on both sides of us got burnt too.”

Fortunately for Eads, the company was in the process of moving to its current location on Wheeler Avenue. He had already sold the old building to a Fort Smith developer and was leasing it back until it was empty. Virtually all of the business’ computers and records had already been moved. He carried insurance on the facility and said he came out of the ordeal all right.

Jim Bell, Fort Smith fire marshal, wasn’t the marshal at the time, but he said the cause of the fire was eventually found to be a transformer in the basement that sparked because the building had been flooded.

All in the Family

Bill Eads Jr., who is Bill Eads III’s father, is semi-retired. He chuckled when asked his title in the company and said, “I don’t really have one.”

His father, Bill Eads Sr., came to his graduation from the University of Arkansas in 1950 on a Friday. Bill Eads Jr. said his father looked at him and said, “‘I’ll see you in the office on Monday.'”

The junior became the third generation Eads in the business and has worked there ever since.

There were about 20 furniture manufactures in Fort Smith in the 1940s and ’50s, but almost all of them folded or moved over the years, Bill Eads Jr. said. Most of the departures came in the 1970s.

When asked how Eads Bros. managed to stay afloat during the Great Depression and the tapering off period of the ’70s, he said the company just tried to change with the times.

Bill Eads III echoes his father. “That’s one of the keys to our success. We’ve changed and we’ve adapted to ways of doing business differently like the imports and the bedding thing.”

The younger Eads grew up around the company and worked there in the summers as a teenager. An outdoorsman, he moved to Colorado in 1975 because “it was the place to be” for nature lovers. He made fast friends with the owner of a racquetball club in Glenwood Springs and started teaching the game, then eventually managed the club.

In 1985 he came back to Fort Smith with his wife and their first son.

“The time was right, I guess,” he said.

He’s been in the family business ever since.

Bill Eads Sr. died in 1989.

“I’m glad I came back before he died so he knew I was back here … to carry on the business.”

Bill Eads III now has three children ranging in age from nine to 19. His oldest son, Christopher, will start his second year in college this fall and is spending his summer working in the warehouse.

“Do I want them to get involved in the business? I guess like any good father, I want them do to what they want to do to be happy,” he said. “And if they want to do this, that’s fine.”