Business
L.A. wildfires prompt surge in local home furnishings market
The day after the Palisades fire broke out, luxury staging company Vesta began manufacturing beds around the clock.
Vesta produced 1,000 that first week from its factory near downtown Los Angeles. The beds — along with the company’s supply of sofas, dining tables, outdoor furniture, area rugs, linens, kitchenware and even faux plants — were quickly rented by displaced wildfire victims.
“We’re doing basically toothbrush-ready homes. Everything needed to get back up and running,” co-founder Brett Baer said. Some clients had lost all of their possessions except “the pair of shoes that they got out of the fire with.”
The January wildfires created a highly unusual situation in the local home furnishings market. Thousands of residential structures and everything inside them burned down, setting off a frantic scramble to find new lodging and replace the entirety of a home’s contents.
Many of those items, such as furniture and appliances, are typically big-ticket purchases with long life cycles, making rebuying an infrequent occurrence under normal circumstances.
Now, sellers of furniture and other home decor around L.A. are seeing an unexpected rise in sales. It’s a trend they anticipate will accelerate in the months to come as those affected by the fires receive insurance payouts and move out of temporary accommodations, where many still remain, into permanent residences.
“Natural disasters such as the California fires, floods, hurricanes, etc., create incredible spikes in demand,” said Ray Allegrezza, a director for the International Home Furnishings Representatives Assn. “West Coast furniture retailers are realizing a windfall of sorts…. It is a shame that the business had to come as a result of this disaster.”
About two weeks after the start of the Palisades and Eaton blazes, Ikea stores in Los Angeles County began noticing an uptick in sales for sleep and kitchen basics, said Gus Tinajero, the company’s Los Angeles area manager.
Ikea stores in the L.A. area saw an increase in sales of bedding and kitchenware after the fires.
(Adam Tschorn / Los Angeles Times)
“Once we started to see the trend, we started to react,” he said, which included increasing orders from its Kern County distribution center and allocating more in-store floor space and pallets for coveted essentials such as comforters.
“We have planned for a prolonged period where we see high demand in those categories,” said Tinajero, who was Ikea’s area manager in Houston when Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017. “It’s not something you ever hope for or plan for, but the reality is it’s [thousands of destroyed] structures — of course you see that there’s going to be a need in the market.”
By far, the biggest impact of the January wildfires was on homes.
In all, just under 13,000 households were displaced by the Palisades and Eaton fires. They came from nearly 9,700 single-family homes and condominiums, almost 700 apartment units, more than 2,000 units of duplexes and bungalow courts and 373 mobile homes that Cal Fire determined were either destroyed or heavily damaged.
A firefighting plane makes a drop on a burning home in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Related businesses, such as interior designers and home staging companies, are also mobilizing to meet the unprecedented demand. Many have started to offer turnkey packages, outfitting new homes from top to bottom.
Vesta’s swift pivot to mass-manufacturing beds and other furniture and renting its stock of lightly used home goods has upended its business model: The company’s luxury leasing division now accounts for more than 90% of its sales, a massive jump from just 15% at the start of the year. Baer said Vesta is on track to take in $100 million in revenue this year.
On a recent Tuesday morning, Baer made his way through Vesta’s 6,000-square-foot Florence factory, maneuvering past stacks of upholstered headboards and newly built armchairs wrapped in green plastic as workers sanded down wooden tables and benches.
Brett Baer, co-founder of Vesta, at the company’s Florence factory.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Vesta was founded in 2017 and serves affluent customers in L.A., San Francisco, New York and Miami. Today it has 360 employees, 30 of them hired since the wildfires began to keep up with the surge in business.
Originally focused on residential and commercial staging, Vesta branched out to include interior design, retail sales and short-term rentals; it designs all of its furniture, producing half in L.A. and outsourcing the rest to third-party manufacturers.
The company doesn’t lease its pieces a la carte, instead offering tailored whole-home packages with on-site setup. Many wildfire victims have been forced to downsize from large homes in Pacific Palisades to condos and apartments, so Vesta has been working with customers to adapt to smaller-format spaces, like sourcing trundle beds for families with young children.
“For displaced people, we’re doing anything between like 1,000 square feet, which may be a couple thousand dollars a month, to one that’s 20,000 square feet in Brentwood that’ll probably be $20,000 a month to rent everything: furniture, cutlery, linens, pillows, mattresses,” Baer said. “A lot of people are like, ‘I just want to move into a completely done house, down to toilet paper holders.’”
The revenue boost comes after a sluggish period for the furniture industry, which experienced a boom during the pandemic as people quarantined and spent heavily on sprucing up their homes.
That tapered off in recent years due to a number of factors including shifts in consumer spending, high inflation and a slowdown in the housing market, leading to a surplus of merchandise for many home furnishing retailers going into this year.
“Fortunately for consumers in distress and needing furniture in short order, inventory levels are still abundant,” Allegrezza said.
Consumer spending for residential furniture and bedding fell 3% last year to $116.1 billion, according to the American Home Furnishings Alliance. The number of production workers for furniture and related products fell to 235,500 people from 244,800 in 2023, the group said.
A Vesta worker builds a sofa cushion at the company’s factory.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Later that morning, at Vesta’s cavernous warehouse in Pico Rivera, workers packaged and loaded furniture onto trucks as the company’s interior designers browsed the aisles for items including lamps, board games, stuffed animals, Peloton bikes and framed art.
The last couple of months have been “incredibly turbulent” for the company, Baer said. Thirty-four homes that were staged with Vesta’s furnishings burned down or were damaged in the Palisades fire, and he said insurance would cover only about 70% of the losses.
“It’s been a double-edged sword. We took a huge hit there,” he said. “But then there’s like this regeneration on the other side: Everything on the Westside is selling. Most of those people want furniture, too. We’re trying to replenish all that inventory as fast as we can.”
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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