Retail Buying
Buying trip with Gallery Furniture exposes students to real-world business practices
They spent a week ordering rugs, lamps, mattresses and anything else that appealed to their tastes, ordering much of what the Gallery Furniture buying team would bring back to one of the highest-grossing single-store furniture businesses in the nation.
Three Mays marketing majors were apprentice furniture buyers for a week in 2005 in High Point, North Carolina, during one of the largest home furnishings market weeks in the nation. They were sent out on a two-pronged mission by Gallery Furniture's charismatic owner Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale: Aid Mack's eight-man team in finding his picks for the store, and add their own vibrant flair to the furniture that will be on display in his 250,000-square-foot furniture wonderland.
The experience added a third dimension to the classroom instruction of professor Cheryl Holland Bridges, also director of the Center for Retailing Studies, who created the nation's fist-ever retail buying class housed in a business school.
"You really started to understand what it was like to be a buyer," said senior Chelsea Ray. "What if it doesn't sell? You really fall in love with a lamp and then wonder: What if that's just your taste and not a customer's taste? Now we know what Mrs. Bridges' excitement was all about when she talked about buying."