Reichart Furniture
Founded : 1917
Activities : Retail furniture collection, home furnishings, interior design services
Parent Company : Heilig-Meyers Co.
Stockists : NA locations
Origin : Wheeling, WV

www.ReichartFurniture.com

By 1992 Heilig-Meyers had set a goal of 50 new stores a year. In that year it acquired 13 stores from Gibson McDonald Furniture Co. for $13.7 million, four stores from Reichart Furniture Corp. for $739,000, and 14 stores in Pennsylvania and West Virginia from Wolf Furniture Enterprises for $6.8 million. Of Heilig-Meyers’s 401 stores, 60 percent were less than four years old. There were five distribution facilities, each designed to serve between 90 and 125 stores within a 200-mile radius.

Heilig-Meyers purchased Carlsbad, California-based McMahan’s Furniture Co. for $65 million in 1993. This acquisition added 92 stores: 65 in California, 12 in Arizona, seven in New Mexico, four in Texas, three in Nevada, and one in Colorado. The company entered the Chicago area by purchasing 11 L. Fish stores. This acquisition of Fish’s four downtown and seven suburban stores was a departure from the company’s traditional focus on smaller markets, but DeRusha said they were a good geographic fit for Heilig-Meyers, which had been expanding in the Midwest. Also in 1993 the company began sponsoring a NASCAR racing team.