Some of the brands it owned in the furniture industry included Broyhill, Thomasville, Drexel Heritage, Henredon, Hickory Chair, Pearson, Laneventure, and Maitland-Smith.
New owner KPS Capital Partners announced the formation of Heritage Home Group on November 25 of that year.
At age 16 in the 1870s, Henry W. Peters went to work for Claflin, Allen & Company, at a time when St. Louis, Missouri, had wholesale distributors of shoes rather than manufacturers.
Isaac S. Taylor designed the eight-story headquarters built in 1901 at 13th Street and Washington, which was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
Peters Shoe Company had continued significant growth, and its products sold all over the United States and even in Mexico and Europe.
The sale, intended as a solution to this problem, resulted in a Federal Trade Commission challenge under the Clayton Antitrust Act.
Without a union, workers had to grudgingly accept the inevitable layoffs and wage reductions which kept the company profitable.
The company found itself in the Supreme Court again in 1945, where its practice of soliciting in-person offers and fulfilling them in a state separate from its retail locations was the subject of a landmark case taught in law schools across the country.
[5] The Hannibal, Missouri, plant, that started in 1898 with a million pairs a year by 1908, made Poll Parrot and Star shoes.
[6] Frank Rand led International Shoe through a time of major growth and through the difficulties created by the Great Depression.
Eventually, most International Shoe plants organized because the New Deal outlawed the company's strategies to prevent unionization.
But Chambers' strategies kept Interco successful, reaching a billion dollars with consistent growth in sales and earnings.
Paul Broyhill remained as CEO for five more years, leaving when Interco made changes with which he did not agree.
Unfortunately, due to the costs of buying Converse and Lane, Interco itself appeared by this time to be a takeover target, more profitable as a group of separate companies to be sold than as a single unit.
Interco filed for Chapter 11 in January 1991 and sold all of its operations except Broyhill, Lane, Converse, and Florsheim.
Apollo Investment Fund, Ltd., led by Drexel Burnham Lambert's Leon Black, took a controlling interest in the reorganized Interco, which emerged from bankruptcy in August 1992.
At the time, the Designer Brands group included Henredon, Hickory Chair, Laneventure, Maitland-Smith, and Pearson.
This brought the total number of N.C. jobs cut by Furniture Brands to 8726, 2740 of those in the Triad, since 2000, during which time the company had also closed 39 of 57 U.S.
[22][23] The company completed its 52,000 square feet (4,800 m2) headquarters in two stories of 14-story Shaw Park Plaza in October.
[24][25] In 2009, Thomasville, Drexel Heritage, Henredon, and Maitland-Smith made their debut at the Las Vegas Furniture Market, where Broyhill and Lane had been exhibiting since 2005.
Analyst Budd Bugatch of Raymond James & Associates compared Furniture Brands board members to the pigs in George Orwell's Animal Farm.
[29] On October 2, a judge approved a $280 million stalking horse offer by KPS Capital Partners.
KPS announced the name Heritage Home Group LLC for the new owner of "substantially all of the assets" of Furniture Brands on November 25.
[31][32][33] Furniture Brands International became FBI Wind Down Inc., and chief administrative officer and general counsel Meredith Graham was put in charge of liquidation.
[35] FBI Wind Down cancelled its stock effective August 1, 2014[36] but continued to dispose of former Furniture Brands properties.