Rooms To Go

Rooms To Go Incorporated

Type	Private
Industry	Furniture
Founded	September 7, 1990
Founder	Jeffrey Seaman Morty Seaman
Headquarters	Seffner, Florida, U.S.
Number of locations	132 (July 2016)
Area served	United States Puerto Rico
Key people	Jeffrey Seaman (Founder and CEO) Morty Seaman (Founder) Stephen Buckley (President and COO)
Revenue	US$ 2.1 billion (FY15)
Number of employees	5,500 (2016)
Website	Rooms To Go Official Site

Rooms To Go Incorporated is a Seffner, Florida-based furniture store chain with 226 stores operating in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Puerto Rico. The company was founded on September 7, 1990 by Jeffrey and Morty Seaman, when they sold Seaman Furniture Company. According to Furniture Today, Rooms To Go is the 3rd largest furniture retailer in the country.

Julius Seaman opened his first store in 1933 after dropping out of the seventh grade. His enterprise gradually increased to an annual $150,000 in sales and allowed him to send his two sons to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "His big[gest] goal in life was that his boys would follow him and build up his business," Morton Seaman told Forbes. Julius Seaman died at the age of 48 of a heart attack. He left Morton, the elder son and college graduate, to help his mother save for the business, while Carl, still in school, did what he could on weekends and vacations.

In 1955, they spent $1,000 USD on the store's first ad. It was a full-page spread in a local paper. When sales tripled, the same week the ad was published, Morton decided to open a second store to reduce the cost of advertisement per unit. By 1971 there were seven Seaman stores.

In 1988, Seaman's Furniture was taken over in a buyout by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. for $350 million, burdening the company with severe debt. Jeffrey Seaman, son of Morton Seaman, was only 28 at the time, but he shouldered a large portion of the buying duties for the company. He and his father developed an overseas program during Seaman's restructuring phase.