Chattanooga: Overstock shop thrives

For Anita Merciers, each 40-hour work week is a family affair.

In March, she opened Bed Decor & More Outlet in East Ridge with parents Ralph and Brenda Pyle, and the three have worked together nearly every day since.

Mrs. Merciers, who has a 16-year-old son, jokes that her parents sometimes boss her around in the store, but the threesome actually spend much of the day laughing together as they work.

“That’s one thing about our family, we all get along pretty well,” Mr. Pyle said. “We even go to church together.”

Since they opened the store about three months ago, the family has been rather successful together, too. While other businesses in Chattanooga and across the country have struggled this year with slow sales and little traffic, business keeps getting better at their home decor outlet.

“With the economy the way it is, it’s hard for people to afford anything nice anymore,” Mrs. Merciers said.

She said the store’s customers are looking to save money while getting high quality items for their home. As soon as they open the doors most mornings, customers are coming in, and it’s been that way nearly every day since they opened.

They launched the outlet business in a shopping area near the Dollar General store on Ringgold Road with an initial investment of about $40,000. Since then, store sales have grown by about 100 percent each month, Mr. Pyle said.

“It’s fantastic,” he said. “It’s just like every week it picks up and picks up.”

The store sells overstocked home decor items from high-end department stores for substantial discounts, sometimes as much as 90 percent off the original price.

The store’s inventory includes everything from kitchen curtains and place mats to sofa slipcovers and everything needed to make a bed. The stores that the items come from cannot be named because of an agreement with the distributor, but the labels are instantly recognizable to shoppers.

Some items such as comforters that go for $400 regularly, were on sale last week at the outlet for $35, which also included an in-store discount of 50 percent. Mrs. Merciers said they often offer sales above and beyond the discount already offered on the items.

Shoppers like Lois Spence enjoy visiting and digging through bins of discounted curtains, sheet sets, bed skirts and pillow shams. She drove about 30 minutes from Rock Spring, Ga., to shop at the home decor outlet for the second time since it opened.

She is always looking to save money anywhere she can, and items for her home are no exception, she said.

“There’s so much different stuff,” said Mrs. Spence, who described herself as an avid shopper. “I never buy anything if it’s not on sale.”

The day she visited the store, she bought towels and a set of sheets for her king-size bed and spent $50 on items that she said easily would have cost several hundred dollars in a department store.

Demand for the store’s items have been so high, Mrs. Merciers said, that she and her parents hope to open more units by the end of the year, possibly in Ringgold and Hixson.

Mr. Pyle and his wife formerly owned Four Seasons Nursery, which they sold in 2004 after 17 years of working nearly 70 hours a week. Mrs. Merciers also owned a store of her own for several years called Eclectic, which closed in 2006.

Since they had owned businesses on and off over the years, when this concept of selling overstock items and shelf pulls came along, it seemed like the perfect fit for something for the family to do together, Mrs. Merciers said, and her parents agreed.

“The business started as a family thing, not just a business,” Mr. Pyle said.