City Furniture and Mattress Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Competition

City Furniture and Mattress (CFM) compete in the retail furniture industry that is fragmented market within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The firms that compete against the City Furniture and Mattress (CFM) in the industry includes smaller local firms and big-box chains like The Brick and Leon’s Furniture.

Although The Brick and Leon’s Furniture where the leading player in the retail furniture market, but they did not dominate the retail furniture market in term of market share and size as they dominated in the other retail sectors. However, Sleep Country Canada the company that is a dominant player in the mattress industry with around 40 stores and an estimated market share of 35 % alone in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).

The greater shift has occurred in the industry over the few years in the way products being sold and the amount and types of products being sourced. In the past the majority of the furniture’s sold in Canada were made in Canada.But today it represents much less fraction of the products that sold and products sourced from the Asia dominate the market. This means that in the past company’s source just a few items from Asia, but currently, greater amount of products are sourced from Asia by companies in the industry.

The companies in the industry are competing on the basis of low prices and especially the competition from the local companies are putting the negative price pressure on the marketplace, creating difficulties for the other competitors to maintain their position in the market. However, Big-Box Chains are promoting themselves as a price leader and the smaller companies in the industry priced their products below the price level of Big-Box Chains.

City Furniture and Mattress (CFM) sold the variety of home furnishing products in three product categories that included living room, dining room and bedroom. Each product category is available in the wide price range. The delivery service of the company as compared to the other players in the market is not up to the mark and the company has many issues regarding their reduced delivery service. The company does not havemuch skilled and experienced employees for their customer services as compared to its rivals in the industry. The companies in the industry do not spend much effort in term of money and time for promoting and marketing of their products.

However, it is important to make customized products that meet the expectations of the customers, motivate and train the staff with skills that are required for a high quality customer service and building effective relationship with the customers are the skills and strategies that are important in order to compete and maintain better position in the industry. The key success factors in the industry are the design and quality of the product as well as branding and pricing of the product.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

The main strength of City Furniture and Mattress (CEM) is the experienced managerial skill of both the owners of the company. This strength helped the company in managing critical day-to-day operations of the company. In addition to this, the experience of City Furniture and Mattress (CEM) in direct global sourcing that provides the company a legacy advantage from the Singh’s brief foray into the business of wholesale distributors. Another strength of the company is the location of Toronto that generates a major part of the revenue of City Furniture and Mattress (CEM) among all the available locations of the company.

Weaknesses

The decrease in the profitability and productivity of City Furniture and Mattress (CEM) is the main weakness of the company. The instable Pickering location of the company as this location of the company is incurring the significant losses that affected the overall profitability of the company. However, issues with the customer service delivery is another weakness of the company as it becomes a significant problem for City Furniture and Mattress.

The delivery system of the company is not satisfactory due to the lack of services associated with the delivery of the product. Furthermore, limited inventory capacity is another weakness as the current warehouse of the CFM are operating at the full capacity making it difficult to expand the business operations. The inabilities of the company to attract the experienced and skilled employees is for enhancing the production level.

Opportunities

City Furniture and Mattress (CEM) could enter into the new markets or a segments in order to attract larger audiences towards their brand offerings. As, the people are willing to browse various stores, so, this would provide the company an opportunity to enhance its profitability as well as its customer base. Additionally, another opportunity that City Furniture and Mattress could avail is to adopt the strategy of vertical integration.............................

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