This End Up furniture company’s Stewart H. Brown Jr. dies; firm helped popularize crate style

Stewart H. Brown Jr., the former president of now-defunct furniture retailer This End Up, died Friday. He was 69.

Mr. Brown left a successful career as a Richmond stockbroker in 1976 to join his wife, Elizabeth Robertson "Libby" Brown, in a company that pioneered crate-style furniture.

Her brother and his friend started making the furniture in 1974 in North Carolina. The brother persuaded Libby Brown to open the first This End Up retail store on Strawberry Street in Richmond's Fan District in 1975.

A year later, when four more stores opened, Mr. Brown was so impressed with the concept and consumer acceptance that he joined the company to manage its operations. The corporate headquarters was in downtown Richmond.

"Stewart was the businessman behind the company," said Wallace W. Epperson Jr., a furniture industry analyst with Richmond-based Mann, Armistead & Epperson Ltd.

"When he went into the business, he took over and organized it and brought professional accounting and banking to it," Epperson said. "He took what was a terrific idea and made it into a successful business. Without Stewart, it would have been just a good business but not the great business that it was."

Mr. Brown shunned the limelight, preferring to work behind the scenes to enlarge the business.

"He and his wife were a terrific team," Epperson said. "They recruited some of the best and brightest in the business."

Mr. Brown also recognized the value and need to have women in key decision-making roles in the company, Epperson said. "Stewart surrounded himself with very smart women."

One was Caroline H.S. Hipple, who spent 22 years at This End Up, starting as a sales clerk in 1977 and rising to become executive vice president. She left in 1999.

"He changed my life so much for the better," said Hipple, the former president of Storehouse Furniture. "He was the one who built a company around the people -- to treat the people well and the company will thrive. He believed in a simple concept of empowering people and the business will bloom."

He also was a trendsetter, she said, by deciding to put This End Up stores in regional malls -- the first home-furnishings retailer to do so.

"He was so innovative," she said. "When people were looking left, he looked right. He was counterintuitive in his business strategy."

A decade after opening the first store, This End Up operated 100 locations across the country.

The retailer was bought in 1985 by then-retailing giant Melville Corp. in an exchange of stock worth $47 million. Melville at the time operated chains including CVS drugstores, Linens'n Things household furnishings, Marshalls apparel stores, and FootAction shoe stores.

Mr. Brown remained as president -- his wife stayed on as executive vice president -- until 1990.

This End Up was sold in a leveraged buyout to a management-led team in 1996. The company shut down in 2000 after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection

In 2001, the Browns bought the private 50-acre Fowl Cay island in the Bahamas, about 70 miles from Nassau.

They spent a couple of years developing Fowl Cay into a mini-resort, where they lived much of the year. They sold the island about two years ago to the Sandals beach-resort organization, Mrs. Brown said.

A memorial service will be held Monday at 11 a.m. at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, 6000 Grove Ave., in Richmond.

In addition to his wife, survivors include a son, Stewart H. Brown III of Miami; a daughter, Ellison Brown Caplice of Richmond; a sister, Susan Brown Denious of Philadelphia; and five grandchildren.

Staff writer John D. Clarke contributed to this report.