Shaw: Jury Still Out on Martha Stewart Line

Dalton, GA, Mar. 11--Shaw Industries Inc. is taking a "wait-and-see" approach to its Martha Stewart Signature floor covering line, a Shaw official said Monday in a story by Bob Gary Jr. of the Chattanooga Times/Free Press. "We're going to see what our dealers and our customers have to say about it," said Julius Shaw, an executive vice president for the Dalton, GA based carpet giant. Retailers already stocking the Shaw-made line bearing the name of Stewart, who was convicted Friday in New York City of felonies including obstruction of justice, will "hang in with it," an industry observer said. "I really think that a female customer goes into a store, sees something she likes and wants to make her home look good," said Dave Foster, the Calhoun, GA based host of FloorRadio, a talk show about the flooring industry. "It's not awfully important to her what Martha Stewart has done in areas other than home furnishing." Stewart and Bob Shaw, chairman and CEO of Shaw Industries, announced the launch of the Martha Stewart Signature line in April 2002. By midsummer, she was awash in controversy generated by reports that she had improperly sold stock in ImClone, a biotechnology company, the previous December. The stock sale took place one day before federal officials rejected an ImClone cancer drug, after which the company's stock plummeted. The drug, Erbitux, has since been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. Julius Shaw said the "excitement" surrounding the Stewart line's launch didn't last long. "We had a lot of momentum," he said, "but when the stories began to break in June of 02, that pretty much took the wind out of the sails of the program." Foster said "dealers pulled back immediately," a reaction that moved Shaw officials to respond in kind. "(Shaw) didn't put the energy in it they might have otherwise," he said. "(The Stewart line) never got acceptance at the dealer level. It's unfortunate, because it's a really beautiful line." Julius Shaw said the Stewart line is in "roughly 400" stores nationwide. "We'd hoped to have a little over double that," he said. "We had expectations when we launched the program that it would be somewhere between one and two percent of our sales, but that never materialized." Even so, Julius Shaw said, "We're not mad at (Stewart) at all. We feel sorry for her at this tough time in her life."

Related Topics:Shaw Industries Group, Inc.

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