Thom Filicia is one heckuva nice guy

Yes, Virginia, I get star struck.

Mind you, I don't fall for the kinds of 'stars' that most of you might. Sure, I think it's way cool that Jessica Lange shopped in the store at Tobacco Row when filming a really forgettable movie with Gwyneth Paltrow. And do I love telling people that Sissy Spacek used to shop in Charlottesville on Christmas Eve (her birthday is Christmas day), and would walk through the store shouting "Schuyler! Madison! Come on... time to go"? Uh, yeah... it's a great story.

My real star struck, dumbfounded, must see, can't think what to say moments happen when I see, meet, or hear about a sale to (drumroll) an HGTV designer.

These people are like my family. They come into my living room and bedroom and show me how wonderful it can be to have GOOD TASTE and FUN IDEAS when you decorate a space. They ask their homeowners to be receptive and creative. They take risks. They are almost always disarming, charming, and funny.

You may remember the post about last fall's High Point market, when I mentioned being really really close to Candice Olson at a Revco party. Well, I actually MET Ms. Olson 6 months earlier at an American Leather party. As she towered over me, there I stood, between friends Jeff & Tom. Jeff, too, was a fan. I blabbered on about how funny she is and how she and her crew seem to get along so well (*ugh*). Jeff told her he was a fan of all of her kitchen renovations. Tom, seizing the opportunity to mortify both of us, asked her if she remembered the episode when the Klingons took over... comparing us to nerdy little Trekkies. If the shoe fits...

Anyway, back to last fall, which was the prelude to this past weekend's events. You may remember that our own Lisa Degenaars had a brush with fame when she got to meet Thom Filicia - original 'home design specialist' on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and now HGTV star and furniture designer.

Lisa attended a breakfast where she sat with one of Thom's friends. Afterward, she made her way to the man himself and got this photo as proof. She was thrilled.
(Vicariously, so was I.)

Now... to last week. It's a Thursday morning like any other. We walk into a 10:30 meeting and learn that our warehouse manager, Terry Fisher, will be making a delivery to upstate New York to deliver a bed that Bethany Magus sold. Cool. We like selling stuff, so this was good.

Two hours later, Andy-husband-president-of-LaDiff shows me the paperwork for the bed sale.

The customer is none other than... Thom Filicia.

Really? REALLY??? Are you KIDDING???

Lisa was in the next room. I called her to my office and told her to sit down - she did, laughing at me. I handed her the pink ticket.

She saw the name and looked at me in disbelief.
So exciting...

Now, at this point, we have no idea if Thom bought the bed for himself or if one of his employees bought the bed in his name for a client... but, we're going to find out. And... just in case he's there at the delivery, Lisa plans to send the photo with Terry... so that Thom maybe, might sign it for her.

Fast forward to Sunday afternoon, and the phone call I got from Terry Fisher.

"Mission Accomplished."

Thom WAS there. The bed was for a friend & neighbor.


He signed Lisa's photo, and he willingly let Terry take his photo on the new bed.


He posed for photos with
Terry and his wife Theresa in front of our truck, and he encouraged Terry & Theresa to walk around the property and check out the lake.


Like we said... Thom Filicia is one heckuva NICE GUY. Thanks, Thom. Shop with LaDiff ANY time!

LaDeals Part 2: Behind the scenes

By LaDiff's Graphic Designer & Marketing Liaison,
Juliette Heydenrych


You might be wondering, what to baby chicks have to do with furniture? Well, there are some similarities. In Part 1, I explained the raison d'être for LaDeals: Good design should be available for everybody.

With spring in the air, we decided it was the perfect time to roll out LaDeals. You know all that sexy furniture I mentioned in Part 1 which converted me away from the big blue & yellow box? Well, now it has a name.

Enter Elevation.

Elevation brilliantly branded LaDeals and came up with the idea for the television promotion. It involved about a hundred baby chicks and some bright yellow tags.

During the early deliberations of the LaDeals category, we tossed around names like BrightBuys, SoLos and a personal favorite… Wowsers. Sadly, Wowsers didn’t make the final cut, but LaDeals did. The next steps would be making sure our LaDeals would be bright and visible throughout the store.

Branded with bright yellow tags, LaDeals hit us with a little spring fever. Our heads full of baby birds saying “cheep! cheep!”, Elevation came up with our latest Television ad.

The ad opens on the white limbo of a studio. We see a collection of LaDeals pieces. All over the furniture and floor are dozens of fluffy baby chicks. Andy, the voice of LaDiff, speaks the voiceover.

“…some of our staff worried that the name ‘LaDeals’ wasn’t quite enough to convey exactly how low the prices are. SO we’ve covered some of our many LaDeals with these baby chicks in hopes that you’ll remember one important fact. Our LaDeals are really, really…”

Cut to an extreme close up of a chick.

“…tagged in yellow”.

The real challenge with this production was purely logistical. After all, we’re in furniture. Where are we going to get a clutch of baby chicks? (Clutch is the official term referring to a group of chicks.) What would happen to them post-production?

As it turns out, you can’t just write up an ad with a group of animals in it and produce the thing without at least a few hoops to jump through first. First and foremost, the ad needs to get approval from the Humane Society.

The Humane Society needed to make certain that the animals would be taken care of before, during and after production. They needed to know where the chicks were coming from, how they were going to be cared for and that they would go to a humane home after all was said and done. They can even designate a representative to be present during production to ensure the welfare of all the critters involved.

Our baby chicks were acquired from a local poultry farmer, and were just 3 days old on the day of filming (it’s amazing how fast they grow)! By the end of the day, these fluffy little peeps were already starting to turn a light brown shade, developing the first tips of feathers on their wings- right before our eyes.

Chicks not on camera snuggled together under a heat lamp- kept at a steady 90 degrees (critical to keep them warm until they start developing head-feathers). The rest of the chicks enjoyed the run of the studio- well, part of it. We created a miniature great-wall surrounding the filming area to prevent chicken run-aways. Inside the barrier, chicks hopped around as we filmed them dozing on sofas, chirping on chairs and pooping- yes pooping- on everything.

We kept the camera rolling as we hustled about cleaning up after the flock. Baby chicks might be small, but they, like all birds, have a seemingly endless supply of poop, which they will happily provide at any given time of day.

Luckily it was a short day. The chicks were only put to work for a few short hours, and by lunchtime we had collected enough footage to take into the editing stages and cut together.

Video is a medium that is incredibly time consuming- especially with regarding to setting up the shots, making sure the lighting is right and adjusting the camera angles. Expecting an extremely long day, I was pleasantly surprised to call it a wrap. We couldn’t have done it without the suspiciously well-developed acting skills of all these baby chicks. One in particular- named Diva by the Princess of LaDiff Lucy Thornton- stole the show flapping her (or his) bright yellow fluff, cheeping on cue and posing coyly in front a LaDeals tag.

“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille,” she seemed to say.

Of course, no animals were harmed during the making of this ad. We hope our fluffy little actors enjoy their early retirement from the stage in their new home. They were donated to a local farmer where they will spend their days on a local Virginia farm, enjoying the view and cheeping to their hearts content.

After sifting through a few hours worth of completely adorable footage, I was finally able to pare it down to the highlights and create a little behind the scenes video of the making-of our ad with Elevation. Enjoy!

LaDeals Part 1: My Dirty Little Secret

By LaDiff's Graphic Designer & Marketing Liaison,
Juliette Heydenrych


First of all, I’d like to congratulate Elevation. As friends & colleagues they never cease to amaze us with their flare for fun & quality work. At this year’s Richmond Ad Club awards, Elevation was named best Ad Agency of the year- a well deserved and hard-earned honor. So, I raise my glass (re-usable water bottle, actually) to Aaron Dotson and Frank Gilliam.

Last year, I wrote a little blog about the making of our fun Bedroom Sale TV ad and our Perfect Seat Sale TV ad, both of which were produced by Elevation. BOTH of these ads won a silver award in the Richmond Ad Club awards for best ad with a budget under $100,000- beating out ads for Geico and FreeCreditReport.com. Again, I raise my glass to you, Elevation.

That said, I’m going to switch gears a little bit.

Now, if you’ve seen our latest ad on TV featuring LaDeals, you might be wondering, What the heck do baby chicks have to do with furniture? More importantly, what the heck are LaDeals?

I’ll address the latter question first.



If you’ve ever broken your back hunched over a disastrous self-assembly with no one to call for help, then LaDeals are for you. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I can’t afford anything at that store” when it comes to deciding where you’ll purchase your new sofa or office desk, LaDeals are for you. If you've ever lived with a cheap, crappy coffee table with a wonky leg that looks like it’s trying to walk away, then LaDeals are for you.

What I’m about to say next might be a little intimate and I apologize if it makes you uncomfortable, but I simply have to come clean about something if I am going to properly explain the true meaning of LaDeals.

Alright, here it goes. Deep breath. My dirty little secret: I am an IKEA shopper.

Well, I was.

It’s not the quality or even the style that first attracted me to IKEA, but the prices. As a poor, fresh out of college starving artist, IKEA appealed to me because it offered me the chance to lose the hand-me-down hodge-podge furniture and make my apartment MINE. My taste, my style, my stuff. Oh, and my wallet.

Hauling things home and assembling everything was time-consuming and painful, and when things didn't quite assemble properly I accepted it as a consequence of going cheap- I wasn't about to lug everything back to switch it out and do it all over again!

The interior of my home was okay, I could live with it for the time being. When I made the decision to move to Richmond from the West Coast two years ago, I did so knowing I had an extremely low budget and would have to leave a lot of things behind. I brought with me nothing but boxes, my mattress and my two lovely cats. I minimized everything I owned as much as possible, loaded up the car with everything I could not live without, and well, here I am. I made the 3,000-mile trek, paid for gas, food and hotel stays on less than $1,000. Let the record state that I am a professional CheapSkate.

So when I got my first Richmond apartment, it needed to be furnished! No longer living in close proximity to the Store-Who-Cannot-Be-Named, and not wanting to drive a grueling 2 hours north, I started my search at home in Richmond. At LaDiff.

The first thing I hear when I tell people where I work is “Oh, I can’t afford that place”. As a professional cheapskate, I have to say that I resent such a statement. With an apartment now crammed full of LaDiff furniture, and done on a shoestring budget, it’s everything I can do to shout to the naysayers, THAT’S NOT TRUE!

My apartment gets a lot of compliments. In fact, the company I rent from didn’t want to let me switch apartments last year until they had found a new tenant, JUST so they could show the place with my furniture in it. This was confessed to me by the rental company manager himself, who knows I work for LaDiff and added that my apartment “shows really well because of how it’s furnished”. It’s flattering.

So that’s how I feel about LaDiff. As a master CheapSkate extraordinaire, if I can furnish my apartment on a tiny budget at LaDiff, anyone can. LaDiff's team is always ready to help, and each item has it's own manufacturer's warranty so I don't have to live with a piece that I don't want to build myself, that might be missing hardware or falls apart when the cats run amock on it, that has a huge scratch out-of-the-box or worse.

Gone are the days of escape-attempting coffee tables, desks with peeling veneer tops and furniture that falls apart after 2 years. Here to stay are the days of LaDeals: Sexy LaDiff furniture with sexy pricing and even sexier quality (is that why there are so many hot chicks in our LaDeals ad?).

Good design should be available for everybody. It’s a sentiment shared by all of us here at LaDiff. We know we have a lot of work ahead of us in breaking down the myth that we can only satisfy those with champagne taste.

And that’s what LaDeals are all about.

Now, what to baby chicks have to do with furniture?

Stay tuned for part 2, and find out.