Luxe Home Interiors, the design-oriented furniture chain that grew out of the former Norwalk stores, has joined forces with Florida-based Design of the Interior (DOTI) stores for merchandising, marketing and future franchising.
Luxe will be the managing entity for the two groups of independently owned stores, with headquarters in Tulsa. Luxe and the Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.-based DOTI will have a total of about 35 stores.
Both groups carry upper-medium to high-end merchandise, and both provide design consulting. DOTI stores use a wider assortment of vendors than Luxe, whose leaders say they have limited the number of sources the stores use in order to become more important to the suppliers. In addition, both the DOTI and former Norwalk stores had been franchise operations but have reverted to independently owned stores.
“We felt like the combination of these two systems, and emerging with the strongest entity possible, was the right thing to do,” said Jim Evanger, who with wife Michele are DOTI’s founders. “It will give us more buying power, more opportunities for scale and more name recognition, and we can work on advertising and marketing programs together.” Read more.
