A housewares agency and a Vermont factory.

Ethan Allen began as a company with another name. The International Directory of Company Histories, in a profile published by St. James Press in 2001, says the Baumritter Corporation, a housewares sales agency, was founded in 1932 by two New Yorkers, Theodore Baumritter and his brother-in-law Nathan S. Ancell. English Wikipedia describes it as a housewares manufacturer. Citing a 1965 Home Furnishings Daily article, the directory says the partners’ early lines of plaster gnomes, trellises and garden swings found few buyers during the Depression.

Ancell later explained the turn to furniture in that interview. He told the reporter Earl Lifshey that he could see no future for a drop-shipment jobbing business in which the firm was “nothing but a middleman,” and that he and Baumritter concluded “we would have to control all the elements with which we were working.” In 1936, the directory says, the partners bought a bankrupt furniture factory in Beecher Falls, Vermont, from a federal agency; its machinery, they discovered, dated from 1917 and was belt-driven. Ancell recalled that it was not long “before we fell hopelessly in love with Vermont and with what New England represents historically.” English Wikipedia also dates the Beecher Falls purchase to 1936.

That attachment to Vermont supplied the brand. The partners put together a group of Early American furniture and, the directory says, named it for Ethan Allen, whose Green Mountain Boys fought to make Vermont the 14th state. English Wikipedia describes Allen as the Vermont Revolutionary War leader and dates the furniture to 1939. The directory says the line was unveiled that year only to selected buyers willing to display it properly in their stores, which it calls the beginning of the company’s exclusive dealer policy.

Correlated rooms, galleries and a new name.

The directory describes the founders’ approach as selling furniture in correlated groupings rather than single pieces. Within the Early American scheme, a customer could add pieces and complete a room over months or years. Ancell, it says, described the company as selling “thoughts,” not “things” — an “environment — not furniture.”

The line grew through factories and acquisitions. By 1962, the directory says, the company had furniture factories across the eastern United States, and that year it acquired Kling Factories of Jamestown, New York; in 1970 it acquired the Volckman Furniture Manufacturing Company of Morrison, Illinois, for upholstered living room furniture. The company also made lamps, painted wooden accessories and decorative wall hangings. It launched a national print advertising campaign around 1951 and later developed its national television advertising, the directory says.

The furniture’s name became the company’s own. According to the directory, in early 1972 the Baumritter Corporation changed its name to Ethan Allen Industries and moved its headquarters from New York City to Danbury, Connecticut; English Wikipedia also dates the Danbury move to 1972 but puts the formal name change in the late 1970s. The same year the company began building a network of owner-managed “showcase galleries” in suburban shopping centres to supplement, and eventually replace, its regular franchised dealers, and announced plans to move beyond Early American styles into carpeting, rugs, wallpaper and draperies.

Ownership then changed twice. The directory says Ethan Allen agreed in 1979 to be acquired by Interco, a St. Louis-based conglomerate, in a deal completed in 1980, with Ancell continuing to head the subsidiary. M. Farooq Kathwari, who had formed a joint venture with Ethan Allen in 1973 and joined as a vice-president in 1980, succeeded Ancell as president in 1985 and as chair and chief executive in 1988. In 1989 a management group led by Kathwari bought the company from Interco, and the holding company, renamed Ethan Allen Interiors, completed its initial public offering in March 1993.

Design and documentation.

For a furniture or mattress retailer, the brand is met first at the scale of a building. Showroom signage has to read from a highway or a car park, so the name usually sits in a single bold wordmark on the façade, often lit at night and repeated on pylon signs at the entrance to a retail park. Inside, the identity steps back and the furniture takes over.

Room settings are the retailer’s main design tool. Sofas, beds and tables are grouped into staged living rooms, dining rooms and bedrooms, with rugs, lamps and accessories that suggest a way of living rather than a single product. Aisle markers, price-tag holders and department headers carry the brand colours in small doses so they do not compete with the rooms.

Catalogues, printed and digital, extend those room settings onto the page: wide photographs, generous white space, a consistent typeface for headings and a restrained palette for captions. On the road, delivery-truck graphics act as moving billboards, so the wordmark is usually large, high-contrast and readable at a glance from another lane. Together, these touchpoints let a home-furnishings name stay recognisable from the street to the doorstep.

From white columns to light, open stores.

Under Kathwari the brand’s stores and styles were redrawn. The International Directory of Company Histories says he found little consistency across the network in store presentation, interior display, merchandise mix and advertising, and quotes Peggy McLinden, the company’s head of store planning, telling Forbes in April 1998 that the “old stores looked like museums.” Between 1992 and 1997, the directory says, nearly every store was renovated and redesigned into light, airy spaces showing more contemporary furniture, and classical yet contemporary storefronts began to replace the familiar white-column facades.

The product line moved with the stores. The directory says company research had shown the Early American style losing favour, and that the company introduced American Impressions in 1991, straight-line pieces in solid cherry inspired by Shaker furniture and the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, followed in 1992 by American Dimensions, which accented geometric shapes, and later by Country Crossings, Legacy and Radius. An advertising campaign launched in the autumn of 1991 aimed at younger customers who associated Ethan Allen with their parents, and sales staff took annual week-long courses at an “Ethan Allen College” set up at the headquarters. The company also broadened into textiles, wall decor, bedding and lamps, the directory says.

The headquarters remains in Danbury. English Wikipedia says the complex includes corporate offices, an interior design centre and the Ethan Allen Hotel, and that the company, incorporated in Delaware, operates retail design centres in the United States and Canada, with further centres run by independent licensees in the United States, Asia and Europe.

Even the stock ticker became a branding question. In August 2021 CNN Business reported that Ethan Allen Interiors would change its New York Stock Exchange symbol from ETH, shared in shorthand with the cryptocurrency ether, to ETD from 16 August; the company said the “D” stood for design.

For a design guide, Ethan Allen shows how a furniture line named for a historical figure can become the name of the whole company, its stores and its hotel. Compare La-Z-Boy, a product name that also became a company name, and Ashley, a maker with its own stores. For this guide we use a deep green, a cherry brown and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ethan Allen’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.