Raymour & Flanigan Brand Guidelines: Two Store Names Joined by an Ampersand in Syracuse

Two brothers and one store in downtown Syracuse.

Raymour & Flanigan began as Raymour’s Furniture, a single store in downtown Syracuse, New York. English Wikipedia gives the founding year as 1947 and names the founders as the brothers Bernard Goldberg and Arnold Goldberg; the trade publication Home News Now, in a report of July 2021, gave the start as 1946, so the two dates sit side by side. The store name was not a family one. English Wikipedia says the brothers named their shop after an antiques business on Long Island that a third brother owned.

Growth was slow in the early decades. The second store did not open until 1972, in Clay, New York; English Wikipedia and Home News Now both date it to that year, and both say that Bernard Goldberg’s son Neil Goldberg joined the business as it opened. Home News Now reported that he was named president and chief executive in 1982, and described the company he joined as one founded by his father and his uncle. English Wikipedia adds that Neil’s brother Steven and their cousin Michael joined in 1977, so the second generation was in the business well before its period of rapid growth.

The name on the sign today comes from an acquisition. In 1990 Raymour’s bought Flanigan’s Furniture, a competitor with 14 stores in the Buffalo and Rochester areas of western New York, according to both English Wikipedia and Home News Now; English Wikipedia says the purchase gave the company its present name. From then on the two store names, one taken from an antiques shop and one that came with a rival chain, were joined with an ampersand into a single retail brand.

Acquisitions across the Northeast.

The 1990 purchase set a pattern of growth by acquisition. English Wikipedia lists Furniture Unlimited in 1997, which took the chain into Philadelphia and southern New Jersey; Futurama, a three-store retailer in the New York area, by 2005; Alpert’s Furniture, in Rhode Island and south-eastern Massachusetts, in 2007; and 18 former Levitz Furniture locations in the New York metropolitan area, which it dates to December 2008. By 2011, English Wikipedia says, the company had 100 stores across seven states of the Northeast.

The count kept rising after that. Home News Now described the chain in July 2021 as having more than 140 stores in seven states. When it opened its tenth Massachusetts store, in the Assembly Row shopping area of Somerville, in May 2024, the same publication listed 68 stores in New York, 36 in Pennsylvania, 35 in New Jersey, 13 in Connecticut, four in Delaware and two in Rhode Island alongside the ten in Massachusetts. English Wikipedia says a separate Raymour & Flanigan Outlet format began in 2016 with two stores in Philadelphia, aimed at a wider range of price points.

The company has also bought property close to home. In April 2024 the Syracuse broadcaster CNY Central reported that Raymour & Flanigan had bought the Northern Lights Plaza, a shopping plaza in Salina, New York, that was built in 1956 and had lost most of its national tenants; the report said the company would concentrate on bringing national retailers back into the empty units.

Ownership has stayed with the founding family. English Wikipedia describes the business as family-owned and says that in January 2021 Seth Goldberg, of the third generation, became president, while Neil Goldberg became chairman and chief executive and Steven and Michael Goldberg became vice-chairmen. Home News Now called the company Liverpool, New York-based in 2021, datelined its November 2026 interview with Seth Goldberg from Liverpool, and quoted him describing a reputation of “almost 80 years.”

The furniture showroom.

Furniture retail is a category built around the showroom. The chains in this group, from the north-eastern United States and the American South to Canada, Australia and France, sell sofas, beds, tables and storage from large stores where pieces are set out as rooms, so a customer can see a bedroom or a living room as a whole before choosing its parts.

Print came early. The International Directory of Company Histories describes an Atlanta furniture partnership of the 1880s and 1890s selling through illustrated newspaper advertisements and through salesmen who carried photographs of furniture styles from door to door. Catalogues, flyers and weekend sale pages followed in the twentieth century, and today the same chains publish websites with room planners and online showrooms alongside the stores.

Naming tends to be plain. Many of these businesses carry a founder’s surname, sometimes joined to another name after a merger or purchase, and ranges are often sold under the retailer’s own label as well as under manufacturers’ brands. Store formats are named just as directly: showrooms, outlets, clearance centres and mattress departments.

Corporate pages fill in the rest. Listed companies publish founding dates, stock-exchange listings and leadership changes for investors, while family-owned chains tell the same story through founders and generations. Purchases of one chain by another, and changes of owner, are usually dated there too. For a designer, the useful material is this mix of a long-running name, a room-set showroom and a steady flow of printed and digital promotions; the tones and typefaces in each guide here are our own reading of that, not an official system.

Showrooms, outlets and Sleep Centers.

The stores themselves are large showrooms set out by room. Home News Now reported in May 2024 that the Somerville store carried furniture and bedding from brands including Tempur-Pedic, Sealy, Stearns & Foster and Purple, offered free mattress consultations and free design consultations, and let customers order in store or online. Its November 2026 report described the company’s mattress departments, called Sleep Centers, and a bedding range that mixes national, direct-to-consumer and private-label names, among them the retailer’s own Sleep by Raymour & Flanigan. The same report described new in-store areas built to show furniture with immersive audio and other technology.

Outside New York, the chain has moved into New England store by store. Home News Now listed Massachusetts showrooms at Millbury, opened in 2018, Somerville, opened in 2024, and Natick, opened in 2026, and reported that the company serves the Boston area from an established regional delivery hub.

For a design guide, Raymour & Flanigan shows how a merged name can settle into one retail brand: two store names, one borrowed from an antiques shop and one that came with a bought competitor, held together by an ampersand for more than three decades. Compare Havertys, an Atlanta furniture chain that has been publicly listed since 1929, and Rooms To Go, a family-run American chain built on whole-room sets. For this guide we use a deep blue, warm stone and a brick red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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