The day after the Palisades fire broke out, luxury staging company Vesta began manufacturing beds around the clock.
Vesta produced 1,000 that first week from its factory near downtown Los Angeles. The beds — along with the company’s supply of sofas, dining tables, outdoor furniture, area rugs, linens, kitchenware and even faux plants — were quickly rented by displaced wildfire victims.
“We’re doing basically toothbrush-ready homes. Everything needed to get back up and running,” co-founder Brett Baer said. Some clients had lost all of their possessions except “the pair of shoes that they got out of the fire with.”
The January wildfires created a highly unusual situation in the local home furnishings market. Thousands of residential structures and everything inside them burned down, setting off a frantic scramble to find new lodging and replace the entirety of a home’s contents.
Many of those items, such as furniture and appliances, are typically big-ticket purchases with long life cycles, making rebuying an infrequent occurrence under normal circumstances.
Now, sellers of furniture and other home decor around L.A. are seeing an unexpected rise in sales. It’s a trend they anticipate will accelerate in the months to come as those affected by the fires receive insurance payouts and move out of temporary accommodations, where many still remain, into permanent residences.
“Natural disasters such as the California fires, floods, hurricanes, etc., create incredible spikes in demand,” said Ray Allegrezza, a director for the International Home Furnishings Representatives Assn. “West Coast furniture retailers are realizing a windfall of sorts…. It is a shame that the business had to come as a result of this disaster.”
About two weeks after the start of the Palisades and Eaton blazes, Ikea stores in Los Angeles County began noticing an uptick in sales for sleep and kitchen basics, said Gus Tinajero, the company’s Los Angeles area manager.
“Once we started to see the trend, we started to react,” he said, which included increasing orders from its Kern County distribution center and allocating more in-store floor space and pallets for coveted essentials such as comforters.
“We have planned for a prolonged period where we see high demand in those categories,” said Tinajero, who was Ikea’s area manager in Houston when Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017. “It’s not something you ever hope for or plan for, but the reality is it’s [thousands of destroyed] structures — of course you see that there’s going to be a need in the market.”
By far, the biggest impact of the January wildfires was on homes.
In all, just under 13,000 households were displaced by the Palisades and Eaton fires. They came from nearly 9,700 single-family homes and condominiums, almost 700 apartment units, more than 2,000 units of duplexes and bungalow courts and 373 mobile homes that Cal Fire determined were either destroyed or heavily damaged.
Related businesses, such as interior designers and home staging companies, are also mobilizing to meet the unprecedented demand. Many have started to offer turnkey packages, outfitting new homes from top to bottom.
Vesta’s swift pivot to mass-manufacturing beds and other furniture and renting its stock of lightly used home goods has upended its business model: The company’s luxury leasing division now accounts for more than 90% of its sales, a massive jump from just 15% at the start of the year. Baer said Vesta is on track to take in $100 million in revenue this year.
On a recent Tuesday morning, Baer made his way through Vesta’s 6,000-square-foot Florence factory, maneuvering past stacks of upholstered headboards and newly built armchairs wrapped in green plastic as workers sanded down wooden tables and benches.
Vesta was founded in 2017 and serves affluent customers in L.A., San Francisco, New York and Miami. Today it has 360 employees, 30 of them hired since the wildfires began to keep up with the surge in business.
Originally focused on residential and commercial staging, Vesta branched out to include interior design, retail sales and short-term rentals; it designs all of its furniture, producing half in L.A. and outsourcing the rest to third-party manufacturers.
The company doesn’t lease its pieces a la carte, instead offering tailored whole-home packages with on-site setup. Many wildfire victims have been forced to downsize from large homes in Pacific Palisades to condos and apartments, so Vesta has been working with customers to adapt to smaller-format spaces, like sourcing trundle beds for families with young children.
“For displaced people, we’re doing anything between like 1,000 square feet, which may be a couple thousand dollars a month, to one that’s 20,000 square feet in Brentwood that’ll probably be $20,000 a month to rent everything: furniture, cutlery, linens, pillows, mattresses,” Baer said. “A lot of people are like, ‘I just want to move into a completely done house, down to toilet paper holders.’”
The revenue boost comes after a sluggish period for the furniture industry, which experienced a boom during the pandemic as people quarantined and spent heavily on sprucing up their homes.
That tapered off in recent years due to a number of factors including shifts in consumer spending, high inflation and a slowdown in the housing market, leading to a surplus of merchandise for many home furnishing retailers going into this year.
“Fortunately for consumers in distress and needing furniture in short order, inventory levels are still abundant,” Allegrezza said.
Consumer spending for residential furniture and bedding fell 3% last year to $116.1 billion, according to the American Home Furnishings Alliance. The number of production workers for furniture and related products fell to 235,500 people from 244,800 in 2023, the group said.
Later that morning, at Vesta’s cavernous warehouse in Pico Rivera, workers packaged and loaded furniture onto trucks as the company’s interior designers browsed the aisles for items including lamps, board games, stuffed animals, Peloton bikes and framed art.
The last couple of months have been “incredibly turbulent” for the company, Baer said. Thirty-four homes that were staged with Vesta’s furnishings burned down or were damaged in the Palisades fire, and he said insurance would cover only about 70% of the losses.
“It’s been a double-edged sword. We took a huge hit there,” he said. “But then there’s like this regeneration on the other side: Everything on the Westside is selling. Most of those people want furniture, too. We’re trying to replenish all that inventory as fast as we can.”
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