Rhody alumni are well-represented on the McKay’s team. From left, Kerry McKay ’81, Kim Froberg ’94, George Dubuque ’16, and Matt Finlay ’02.
McKay’s Furniture is a family-run business that’s stood the test of time. Kerry McKay ’81 owns and runs the company with his two brothers and a small but mighty team, in which Rhody alumni are well represented.
It’s a sunny morning on his day off as Kerry McKay ’81 sinks into an oversized, chocolate leather chair in the middle of the McKay’s Furniture showroom. He’s stopped by the store for an hour or so to take care of business while things are quiet.
McKay has been in the business since he was 12, when he and his twin brother helped their dad schlep sofas and tables around the family’s Providence store. “Keith and I would put everything out on the sidewalk in the morning, then put it all back at the end of the day. We washed windows and unloaded freight cars,” McKay says. “Wrought iron furniture is the heaviest stuff in the world.”
Following decades on Elmwood Avenue, McKay’s brother, Ken, moved the business to the quieter burbs of North Kingstown in the 1970s after vandals shot out the store’s windows. Fast-forward 50 years: Kerry, along with Keith and older brother, Scott, owns two sprawling businesses: McKay’s Furniture and McKay’s Front Porch. The staff includes a half dozen URI grads along with third- and fourth-generation family members among the 20 or so employees.
“We’ve had URI interns and grads who’ve worked for the store,” says McKay, who was a track star and political science major when he was a student at URI. “When somebody comes to work for us, generally they don’t leave.”
Amid the 20,000 square feet of coffee tables and dining sets at McKay’s Furniture, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, but in-house designers can cut through the confusion. One of those designers is Kim Bartkiewicz Froberg ’94, whose introduction to the company happened when, as a kid, she accompanied her parents on a furniture shopping trip. “I remember going to the store with them to buy from Kerry’s parents,” she says.
Froberg studied textiles, fashion merchandising, and design at URI, then came to work at McKay’s. That was in 1996. She’s been here ever since. “The furniture industry is about textiles and how well they wear,” she says. She’s put her URI classes to good use as a McKay’s designer. My education, she adds, “has helped me think about how we promote products and make the store look good.”
“There’s always the opportunity to move up if you have aspirations,” says Matt Finlay ’02. Finlay worked in McKay’s service department in the summers and after school during college, a typical path for company employees. “I learned the business from the ground up. Now I do day-to-day operations.”
Three other URI grads help keep things humming: George Dubuque ’16 is in shipping and part-time sales; Terri O’Neill Susla ’89 handles purchase orders; and Garrett McKay ’12 does bookkeeping for the company.
Given the other furniture stores in Rhode Island, what separates McKay’s from the pack? “We’re smaller and more high-end,” Finlay says. “We carry mostly American-made products, and we do a lot of custom work. We’re low-key and detail-oriented, and we have big-time clients who may summer here, but their main residence is in New York. They promote us through word of mouth.”
Despite the challenges of riding an economic rollercoaster—one year up, the next year down, as McKay describes it—the family business is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year. “There’s no such thing as a 40-hour week, we accepted that early on,” he says, “but we like to work. We like getting things done.”
—Sarah Francis
The Fold features organizations and companies where URI alumni flock. If that sounds like your workplace and you’d like to be featured, please let us know. Email urimag@uri.edu and tell us about the place you work and the URI alumni who work there.
PHOTO: NORA LEWIS