member profile
Forma Furniture
Forma Furniutre, owners Travis and DeeAnn Garrish with their two children, Jayden and Kaitlyn
Fort Collins, CO
G Melissa Dressler Western Reporter managing editor
24
January 2009
oing above and beyond the customer’s expectations is one of the many things that has made Forma Furniture a bright star in Fort Collins, CO. Surrounded by traditional home furnishings stores, this highend Scandinavian contemporary retailer will do anything to keep the customer happy, including returning a sofa the customer didn’t like after six months. Owners Travis and DeeAnn Garrish often go above and beyond their customer’s expectations and receive customers for life. In 2004, Travis and DeeAnn were presented the opportunity to open a contemporary store in Fort Collins by a family friend who was a rep for Ekorness, and they jumped in headfirst. “We literally rented the building, put as much of the Ekorness Stressless product that we could afford on the floor and started picking up more products here and there from other vendors,” Travis said. Travis and DeeAnn both had previous experience in retail. DeeAnn’s father has owned a Scandinavian design store since she was born and DeeAnn worked in the family business until she married Travis. Travis has a background in
westernreporter
sales and worked part-time for his father-in-law. This husband and wife team have taken their combined experiences and created an inviting store that is constantly evolving. Each customer is welcomed into the store as if they were a friend of the family. For many of the customers, who have an average age of about 60, it is the first time or it has been a long time since they have seen Scandinavian or contemporary home furnishings.
Growing Pains Forma Furniture saw instant success, and in the first two years the business grew an average of 40 percent each year. Travis and DeeAnn decided to open a second location in Loveland, CO where the downtown area was going through a revitalization. “We did a one-year lease option to test the waters in Loveland, and that proved to be too much for us,” Travis said. “We are too small of a company to handle a second location. We thought we couldn’t do anything wrong at the time because our sales were so strong, but we ended up having new issues that we never had with our first location. Employee turnover was the worst problem, and we had five different Contact WHFA at www.WHFA.org or (800) 422-3778.