Smith Leonard Residential Furniture Sales Increase 7% Year-Over-Year in June

Smith Leonard’s latest Monthly Furniture Insight survey of residential furniture manufacturers and distributors reported that June 2021 sales were 7% higher year-over-year. In the survey report, Smith Leonard points out that the results of their monthly survey of residential furniture manufacturers and distributors have shown significant swings when comparing to the previous year’s monthly results. Comparing March, April, and May 2021 results to the same periods of 2020, which were the hardest hit months of the COVID pandemic, showed significant increases in orders due to so many dealers being pretty much shut down in 2020.

Smith Leonard had said that those large increases would start to slow as business had really come back strong in June 2020, so it was going to be hard to continue the large increase comparisons. Year to date, new orders were up 51% over the first half of 2020, but down from 67% reported last month. As many companies were taking orders but not back up to full production or getting imports back up through May, shipments had lagged all the new orders, so in June, shipments began to pick up increasing 38% over June 2020. Backlogs continued to increase as orders in dollars exceed the dollar value of shipments. Backlogs were 153% higher in June 2021 than in June 2020.