The Pier takes a promenade: A US furniture and homeware chain is setting up against British high street stores

THE KING'S Road, once the centre of swinging London, seems to be enjoying a retail resurgence. Less than a year ago the street's glamour was marred by boarded-up stores and downmarket second-hand bookshops. Now Marks & Spencer is expanding, Habitat has spent pounds 1m refurbishing its flagship store and new names are moving in.

One such entrant is The Pier, an American-owned furnishings group embarking on expansion in Britain. The group has more than 600 stores in the US with sales of dollars 629m ( pounds 425m).

The Pier docked in Britain in 1989 and has so far built eight outlets, including the new King's Road store. The plan is to build 35 shops here within five to seven years.

In the United States, the stores are typically large, edge- of-town developments. But the strategy in Britain is to concentrate on smaller, 4,000 sq ft sites on the high street or in town centre shopping centres.

The group will be run here by Alison Richards, managing director, who spent eight years with Habitat, including four as buying director. She feels the timing is right for a UK push.

'With falling property values, people will think more about where they live and spend more on their houses. We won't be chasing trends but will focus on good quality at good prices,' she says.

The shops are strong on rattan furniture and colourful Italian ceramics, as well as novelty items such as scented candles and incense sticks. Prices are keen: a rattan chair costs pounds 75 and a china tea set is priced at pounds 13.50. Merchandise comes from more than 40 countries.

The Pier's target market is women aged 25-44 earning more than pounds 20,000 a year. But the question is whether there is room for another trendy furnishings store, when Habitat with 36 stores and the Reject Shop with 32 have a head start.

Ms Richards says The Pier's opportunity is that the market is highly fragmented. According to the retail consultants Verdict Research, the UK's furniture and floor-coverings market (which forms only part of The Pier's merchandise) was worth pounds 7.2bn last year. The market leader, MFI, had only 9.6 per cent, while Ikea had 1 per cent and Habitat half that.

Verdict's senior analyst, Hilary Monk, says the specialist furniture sector is growing at over 10 per cent a year at the moment. 'There's plenty of room in the market for niche players.'

Another question might be whether The Pier is the group to fill a gap in the market. A damning article in a recent issue of Forbes criticised the group, saying its merchandise had no focus and that its management spent too much time glad-handing politicians and not enough minding the store. It said that even according to The Pier's own market research, only one in four people who visited the stores actually bought something.' If ever a business needed less expansion and more tightening up . . . this is it,' it concluded.

The Pier's management is defensive. 'We are selling a wide variety of things for the home which creates traffic,' Alison Richards says. 'That way you get impulse purchases as well as people who have come specifically to buy something. It's not all about destination shopping. A lot of people actually enjoy shopping as a leisure activity.'

She admits the UK stores are losing money at the moment but says this is due to start-up costs. The stores are expected to be profitable by 1995.

(Photographs omitted)