Business Opportunities Weblog

June 14, 2007 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

Star-Telegram:

When Jennifer Selby Long relocated from an office with leased furniture to an unfurnished one, her decorating problems began.

After shopping at different stores, all that the 43-year-old San Francisco resident could find was furniture made with a “5-feet-10-inch man in mind.” Long, who is 5-feet-6, ended up doing a lot of improvising, buying bookcases from Crate & Barrel and inheriting a reddish-gold wood desk from the last office tenant.

With women-owned small businesses growing almost twice as fast as all small business nationwide, retailers — from Swedish furniture store Ikea to OfficeMax Inc. — are just starting to wake up to the demands of female entrepreneurs like Long. These include office chairs and desks scaled to women’s smaller frames, as well as furniture that has more storage to hold purses and other personal items — a top priority for women.

Although women’s design preferences can’t be lumped together, experts say they have definite tastes and unlike their male counterparts, look at their furniture as an extension of their image.

“Women really want to personalize their space. Men are looking for more functionality,” said Kim Roffey, a strategist at Kurt Salmon Associates. When men buy an office chair, they focus on whether it rolls under the desk and provides good back support, Roffey said. Women look at those factors, but at the top of their mind is how it fits with the look of the room, she said.

“I think we have just scratched the surface. This is one of our growth engines of the future,” said Pernille Lopez, president of Ikea North America. Lopez expects that small-business owners, particularly women, could eventually account for 10 percent to 15 percent of Ikea’s U.S. business.

According to the Center for Women’s Business Research, a nonprofit organization that focuses on the estimated 10.4 million businesses owned by women, the number of privately held firms where women owned at least a 51 percent stake grew 42.3 percent from 1997 to 2006.

Photo by Star-Telegram.

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Tags: Strategy, Success, Women