business & professional

Pop-Up Furniture Shop

Danto Furniture opens "micro"
furniture store with a virtual catalog.

D

anto Furniture
open doorway looking into
Company, with its
a bedroom or living room.
main store located
Color and fine detail are
in Southwest Detroit,
easy to see"
recently opened a pop-up
Ashley Danto, 26, began
"micro" store at Laurel Park
working in the family busi-
Place in Livonia.
ness, started in 1940 by
In the Danto micro store,
her grandfather Charles,
customers can browse
age 84, last September. Her
through the hundreds of
father, Irwin, 63, is store
furniture groups as if they
manager. The family lives
are in a 500,000-square-foot
in West Bloomfield and is
building even though the
affiliated with Adat Shalom
micro store uses just 100
Synagogue in Farmington
Ashley Danto
square feet of space.
Hills.
"We are selling Ashley
"I get to learn a lot from
Furniture exclusively from our virtual
working with my father and grandfather;
catalog on special 4K Ultra monitors. The Danto says. "I also enjoy working with
clarity of these images feels completely
the state-of-the-art electronic catalogue
real" says sales and marketing manager
that my dad created. It's the latest tech-
Ashley Danto, who is running the micro
nology"
store. "It is as if you are standing in the
Danto Furniture is the first furniture

State-of-the-art technology allows for shopping via an electronic catalogue.

store to test this "micro store" idea with
Ashley Furniture. The product line
includes bedrooms, dinette sets, leather
and upholstered sofas, sectionals, home
office furniture and entertainment cen-
ters.
Danto Furniture Company has two
locations in Southwest Detroit offering
retail furniture, appliances and electron-
ics from more than 150 name-brand
manufacturers. Some 80 percent of all
merchandise purchases are financed
through Danto's very popular in-store
credit program, which has extended loans

to more than 250,000 Metro Detroit resi-
dents.
The business is engaged with the com-
munity. Danto Furniture used its own
resources to board up more than 250
abandoned homes in Southwest Detroit
and was honored with the Spirit of
Detroit award.
With the micro store, "Danto is taking
advantage of the low overhead operating
costs to provide pricing that rivals direct
wholesale purchases:' Danto says. "We
plan to open several more micro stores in
the Metro Detroit area this spring."

❑

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June 11 • 2015

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