Old Brick recently opened its eighth store in Clifton Park, N.Y., in a former Toys R Us building.

ALBANY, N.Y. — Before jumping into the home furnishings and mattress retail business with both feet, Michael Fiacco, the president and owner of Old Brick Furniture & Mattress Co. based in Albany, N.Y., spent a year working weekends in a furniture store in Yonkers, N.Y.

Fiacco was working in Midtown Manhattan with AIG Trading Group on a trading desk in 2006 when his mother Denise Cyr decided she wanted to sell her retail business, the former Bennington Furniture in Vermont. She wanted Fiacco to step in and buy the local retail operation so she could retire.

He wasn’t convinced that it was the right move or whether he would like it. Therefore, he took a few weekends to explore it.

After his experiment, he traded Wall Street in for furniture retail and grew the retailer to five stores.

Generational business can be tricky, Fiacco said, adding that he and his mother waffled on how best to handle the transition. At the end of the plan, Fiacco said he “bit the bullet and bought the business. If you truly have a vision and want to do implement the vision, you’re going to want and need full control and autonomy.”

That first transition for the company under Fiacco’s leadership took place in 2007. There were more to come, as today the retail operation currently consists of eight Old Brick stores and one Ashley Furniture HomeStore.

When Fiacco bought Cyr out of the business, he set his sights on his next acquisition.

Always one to have a plan in place, Fiacco — who says he consistently looks five to 10 years ahead for strategy shifts in business — was eyeing the two-store Old Brick Furniture chain for a future acquisition.

“I had a vision, and I knew if I could get ahold of Old Brick and scale it, it could be something special,” he said.

That acquisition come to fruition in 2020, and unlike traditional company buyouts, Fiacco went to work rebranding the Bennington Furniture stores to Old Brick Furniture & Mattress stores.

Nine months into the acquisition, Bennington’s five stores were converted over and much of the basic operational techniques Old Brick employed in its two stores were adopted chainwide.

“It was a tough decision to make in changing from Bennington to Old Brick, because our roots were Bennington,” Fiacco said. “I knew what I was buying with Old Brick and the business I bought. He (Henry Terk, the former Old Brick owner) was a better retailer than I was, and the business and the name is very scalable.”

That scalability has Fiacco looking at growth for the chain, and he is exploring what that will look like.

“We’re definitely on a growth trajectory for the future,” he said, adding that it will be opportunity-driven. “I see a lot of volatility in the industry ahead for the next six to 18 months, and that will bring some opportunities to the table. There is not a huge younger generation in our industry, and there are retailers out there without succession plans. I’ll have to see how it all falls into place. Timing and real estate are everything.”

The Old Brick Furniture and the former Bennington Furniture have a connection that runs back to 1987 when Cyr founded Bennington Furniture. Old Brick was started as wholesale distributor under the C&D Distributors name in the 1960s.

C&D gave Cyr furniture on consignment so she could start the furniture business named after its hometown of Bennington, Vt.

After C&D shifted to a retail model and rebranded as Old Brick, Fiacco and Terk became friends via buying group Furniture First, of which they are both members. The relationship opened the door to conversations about an acquisition.

The conversations preceded the pandemic, Fiacco said, adding that Terk and his family wanted to sell and retire from the business.

“It is a very well-run operation with great brand loyalty,” he said, adding that the model and approach to furniture and mattress retailing was strategically on point.

With that approach, and the fact that Bennington Furniture was somewhat limited geographically because of the name, the new Old Brick was born.

Old Brick’s overall sales strategy includes a no-pressure sales approach, zero-commissioned sales team and no promotional sales. While that is different than the former Bennington Furniture’s approach, Fiacco saw it as a more customer-friendly way of operating a retail store and opted to implement it in the new store structure.

“It’s more customer-centric,” he said. “Everyone works as a team, and everyone gets a salary and gets a percentage based on the success of the store.”

Mattresses, adjustable bed bases and sleep products are weighted heavier on the payout scale because of the higher margins. Fiacco said he’s proud of how the team made the shift from a commission to a non-commissioned structure without too may hiccups.

“The majority of our employees have been with us a very long time,” he said. “We could back into the numbers to be sure no one was getting hurt. We made sure everyone was making what they were making under the commission structure.”

In addition to the changeover to non-commissioned RSAs, Old Brick underwent some other changes during the pandemic that Fiacco says have netted strong results.

The most pronounced change was a keen focus on digital sales. When the world shuttered in March 2020, consumers shifted to online shopping. Old Brick has since built a dedicated digital team for online sales and presentation.

“Prior to the pandemic, we were only ad hoc managing our online business,” Fiacco said. “Today, it’s become another channel for sales.”

The e-commerce model has also allowed the retailer to pick up consumers outside of its immediate training area, but Fiacco said the bulk of the business still comes from local consumers who like to come into a store, test out mattresses, price check if they want to, go home and think about the purchase.

“We’ve made it easier for them to buy without having to return to the store,” he said. “We shop our competition, and we know we’re always going to have the lowest prices.”

A strong performing category for the retailer, Old Brick sells mattresses that retail from $499 up to $6,000 in its stores that range from 5,000 square feet to 25,000 square feet. The stores are serviced out of a centralized 70,000-square-foot distribution center.

The mattress category is the retailer’s quickest turning category.

“Mattresses are the easiest, quickest delivery we can make to our consumers,” he said.

Again, Fiacco plans to open or acquire additional stores as the opportunity arises. Along with that growth, his goal is to remain true to the company’s culture and ethos that his customers have come to know and trust.

“Many of our customers are repeat customers, and we make a point to service them to a level that they have become accustomed,” Fiacco said. “That’s where if the consumer really believes in you, and you’re authentic and transparent, they’ll stay with you. We need to stay consistent with our service, our product and our transparency, and we’ll be servicing them for the lifetime they’re in our market.”

I’m Sheila Long O’Mara, executive editor at Furniture Today. Throughout my 25-year career in the home furnishings industry, I have been an editor with a number of industry publications and spent a brief stint with a public relations agency where I worked with some of the industry’s leading bedding brands. I rejoined Furniture Today in December 2020 with a focus on bedding and sleep products. It’s a homecoming for me, as I was a writer and editor with Furniture Today from 1994 until 2002. I’m happy to be back and look forward to telling the important stories impacting bedding retailers and manufacturers.

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