Furniture’s a Family Affair
by Anya Harris
 New Jersey-based Hertz Furniture Systems is a national reseller of high quality furniture and equipment, celebrating 45 years in business this year. The company, which employs more than 100 people and offers products from upwards of 120 vendors, operates on a scale much larger than most ed dealers. This allows Hertz to provide specialized services a lot of the little guys cannot, such as free design help and installation oversight.
Though Hertz’s size puts it in a position to offer more than a lot of mom-and-pop dealers can, the challenges the company faces – and the strategies its employees use to overcome them – aren’t really that different from what happens in your store.
We spoke with Amy Hoffmann, director of marketing, to learn how Hertz has remained competitive for more than four decades. Here’s what she told us.
History
Hertz Furniture is a family-owned business. Chief Operating Officer Saul Wagner is the fourth generation to sit at the helm. David Mocton is national vice president of sales, and Mutty Leiser is merchandising manager.
With roots in the lumber industry, the company created an institutional and educational furniture manufacturing operation in Toronto in 1952. In 1966, the company moved from Canada to the U.S. where Hertz Furniture was created as a mail-order company serving the religious, educational and corporate markets.
The business remained pretty evenly split among those three sectors until 2008, when Hertz revised its strategy to focus primarily on the K-through-12 educational market. Its “typical customers” are public school buying agents and charter school purchasing agents.
Hertz has contracts with some of the biggest school districts in the country, including the School District of Philadelphia, the New York City Department of Education, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Los Angeles USD and San Francisco USD.
Further, Hertz Furniture is the exclusive furniture provider on the Keystone Purchasing Network (thekpn.org), a national cooperative purchasing procurement program. These contracts streamline the buying process for the customer because they are pre-bid. Districts don’t have to go through the expense, difficulty and time of the bid process, all of which makes doing business with Hertz easier.
Going to the customer
The company has no showroom. Instead, customers can visit www.hertz
furniture.com, which offers detailed product information and features numerous images. “One of the challenges we faced as a company in the last decade or so was how to incorporate the Internet into our existing sales model,” explained Hoffmann. “We used to send out hundreds of thousands of catalogs, but now we send them only to active customers. We have embraced the Internet, and blog and post with the associations we belong to. We work hard to improve our online presence. It has become an integral part of our business.”
Sometimes though, Internet pictures cannot replace the real thing.
“We have a generous sample and swatch program,” she told us. “If a customer needs to see a sample of a chair, we will send him a chair.”
 Hertz’s 260-page catalog is still a helpful sales tool, especially at the nearly 40 school purchasing shows the company takes part in each year in California, Pennsylvania, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan, to name a few. Among the shows are state and regional Association of School Business Officials (ASBO) shows for public schools. For charter schools, Hertz maintains vendor memberships in many state charter associations, and attends state- and national-level charter schools’ conferences.
“When a state approves the opening of a new group of charter schools, we will often sponsor a breakfast or lunch for its charter school association and speak there about how to furnish a new school,” said Hoffmann. “We’ll help them figure out what a furnishing budget would look like for a school of a particular size. We also help them decide what items are needs, which are wants and how to formulate a plan to get both.
“It would be ideal for us to find those customers looking to furnish an entire school. We like to do the bigger projects – but that’s not typical – though we do a lot of large projects every year,” she added.
The company has seen an enormous increase in its business with charters in the past three or four years, noted Hoffman. “The charter school movement is only 10 years old and still growing.”
In addition to ASBO and charter association shows, Hertz representatives attend the School Building EXPO and the Green Schools Show. Plans include adding 15 more shows to its already rigorous schedule.
NSSEA’s annual School Equipment Show is extremely important to their business. “We have formed some really good relationships with the vendors there,” Hoffmann told us. “At the show, we meet with them to see what they have coming out and to look for emerging trends. What’s new in the market is important, but it’s also important to see what’s disappeared from the market. A lot of our vendors come to our office to train us, and they all regularly send us information on their new products.”
The season
Hertz’s selling season begins in late winter to mid-spring when sales reps actively reach out to customers and prospects. “Before that, we pre-condition; we’re working our targets, seeing what our repeat customers need, ever mindful of the lead times our vendors require to produce and ship their goods,” said Hoffmann. “We usually have a quick-ship program in the summer. We put a number of items on a list, and if a customer selects something from that list we guarantee that we can ship it to them by a certain date.”
Most schools time delivery or installation to coincide with their summer vacations. This leads to a flurry of activity between May and mid-August in the southern states, and a rush from June through the first week of September for the northern regions.
Hertz encourages customers to plan ahead for big projects like a new science lab, a new library or a new classroom wing. “Our salespeople help them understand the project planning, quotation, sale, order placement, manufacture, delivery and installation cycle. They make sure our customers know what we can and can’t do,” Hoffmann said. “In contrast, other schools will call us last minute needing a hundred desks and a hundred chairs by the following week. If we can possibly do it, we’ll fill the order.”
In addition to a knowledgeable sales staff, the company provides complimentary project planning services through the Hertz Design Center. This department does on-site needs assessments, makes product recommendations and finds products to meet published specs.
“We create 2-D and 3-D CAD drawings and renderings of what a space would look like, and work with our customers to maximize their use of budget dollars, their floor space, and to solve any design or space-planning problems or challenges they might have,” explained Hoffmann.
“While a customer might be furnishing their first library, we’ve done hundreds,” she said. “We can bring our experience and tips to the table and together create a space that answers all their needs and looks beautiful.”
She described a library the company recently completed for a school not too far from the Hertz office. “There wasn’t enough room for tables to accommodate the size of the average class they served, and the school didn’t know what to do. Our salesman went in and sold them shelving that went around the room, but was higher by two shelves. The collections that circulated less frequently were placed up there. It eliminated a couple of rows of stacks, giving them more room for tables and more floor space for the younger kids.”
Customers appreciate the added value of free design services in these challenging economic times. They also like the fact that Hertz stands behind its products with an extended warranty, one the company recently upped from 15 to 25 years.
“For instance, if the furniture manufacturer provides a seven-year warranty, we bring it up to 25 years,” Hoffman said. “Because we add our warranty to everything, we only sell high-quality goods. If we sold lesser-quality items, we’d go broke replacing furniture that simply won’t hold up. We won’t sell inferior goods.”
 Serving an evolving market
Like most ed dealers, Hertz has felt the pinch in the last few years as purchasing for public schools has been limited by budget constraints. “They had no money and weren’t sure what they were going to have, so they put off purchasing anything except to replace items that had broken,” noted Hoffmann. “It drove purchasing agents online where they might have seen, for example, a chair for a bargain-basement price. They didn’t understand that the chair was only going to hold up for a year or two, and then it was going to break. Now, in many cases, they are willing to go for a chair that is going to last for 25 years. They are looking for value as opposed to lowest price. They want goods that will last.”
Buyers are seeking added value in other ways as well. Features like adjustable heights allow districts to move furniture between grade levels, shifting resources to where they’re needed without having to buy a lot of new furnishings. Adaptable furniture that can be re-arranged to suit a variety of teaching styles and activities is also becoming more popular.
“Collaborative teaching has moved up to secondary education settings from the group tables formerly used only in the earliest grades,” explained Hoffman. “Forward-thinking schools are encouraging teachers to adopt the kinds of teaching methods that are best suited to their students’ learning styles.
“The furniture has to adapt,” she continued. “As the students advance in the grades there’s more testing, so the furniture has to be flexible enough to move apart to prevent cheating and then move back together for collaborative instruction and group work.”
Buyers are also looking for furnishings that are manufactured according to green standards and/or will not contribute to poor indoor air quality. “Depending on the school’s location and the buyer’s attitude, LEED credits or a desire to use green products can be key to the purchasing decision. In other places it doesn’t matter. They can base their decisions on other factors altogether, like color,” said Hoffmann.
Furniture that incorporates technology and interactive learning is another growing segment. Computer desks, whiteboards, interactive slates and short-throw projectors are all becoming more sought after.
“There are a million different products that allow teachers to bring technology into the classroom. We’re ever watchful of that,” Hoffman noted. “For instance, Academia makes a student desk that was not originally designed to be a computer desk. Now it comes in a computer-friendly version, with a pull-out keyboard tray, wire management, modesty panels and a pop-up electrical outlet in the back. Whatever new technology comes along, we’re going to be selling it.”
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