Elmore Furniture a Dunn, Clayton fixture

CLAYTON -- Abe Elmore will be 80 on his next birthday.

He sits on a loveseat in one of the many living room sets on the first floor of Elmore Furniture Company in downtown Clayton.

Elmore isn’t a large man, but he extends his arms out over the sofa’s Made-in-America back cushions, his hands resting on the throw pillows – upholstered in American fabric.

His commitment to American-made products has kept Elmore in business since 1955, even when the majority of the American furniture industry imploded because of overseas outsourcing in the 1980s. It’s also why he’s sponsoring the ‘Shop Local Clayton’ campaign, which is working to keep Clayton businesses thriving and resident sales tax dollars inside the county line.

“I was amazed at the number of people that came in and said they’d never been downtown,” Elmore said of the December Christmas Village, where businesses held open houses and Divine Marketing Group passed out goodie bags with discounts to Elmore’s and other Clayton stores.

“We like downtown locations; we’ve always tried to be downtown. That’s what makes a community,” Elmore said. “You could live off of what’s sold downtown.”

Intermittently, Elmore caresses the sofa where he sits, talking about his new contract with Clayton Marcus – the American-made furniture company which made the fabric for the sofa he was sitting on. He just started carrying 750 fabric choices from Clayton Markus.

‘The quality story’

That new contract, along with the Shop Local campaign, offers Elmore some reassurance that it’s still worthwhile to have a made-in-America furniture store in downtown.

Elmore is proud that he’s still here. Sitting on that newly ordered sofa like a king on a throne, Elmore’s confident attitude doesn’t concede that he’s looking for the shop local campaign to bring in more business.

“Our customer base has certainly been good to us, but we could pick up some new customers,” he says looking around the first floor living room sets.

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“Our salespeople tell the quality story,” he said, nodding toward the three women who staff and manage the store while Elmore is at the Dunn or Pinehurst locations. “They tell them it’s American made; hopefully that still means something.”

Three customers came in to have a look around on a recent Friday morning. One couple was looking for a “cheap armchair” to put in a model home – they had come to the wrong place.

If things seem expensive, Elmore says, it’s because it’s quality, made-in-America furniture – and it will last decades. But if price worries anyone, Elmore has in-store, 12-month financing with no interest. In fact, another lady came in that morning to talk about that very financing with Mary Barbour, a 52-year employee, who has worked at the store since before Elmore bought it in 1985.

As a small, independent business with family in Clayton, Elmore and his successors – two of his children work for the company – hope they can adapt to changing attitudes about buying furniture – or for that matter anything – downtown.

“The industry has been good to us. It’s all we’ve ever known. We own our buildings, and we’re serving third and fourth generations. I’ve been (in Dunn) since I was 23 years old,” Elmore says.

Elmore Furniture has been increasing its advertising, and it’s featured on the Shop Local Clayton website and in weekly social media marketing.

While the last two months were strong ones, neither Elmore nor Keri Butler, who’s helping Elmore with his marketing, could attribute the success to the campaign yet. But that doesn’t entirely matter; Elmore seems happy that people are simply talking about shopping downtown.

“By being a group, it’s a family-type thing, once you get ‘em downtown, all businesses help each other,” he said.

But people certainly haven’t forgotten the 27-year-long presence and continuing progress of Elmore Furniture in Clayton.

Just the other day, Elmore was picking something up at the pharmacy in Dunn, when a young woman asked him if he was Abe Elmore of Elmore Furniture in Clayton.

When he said he was, she said her parents, from Clayton, had been, “trading with you for years.”