About The Partners

LESLIE CAROTHERS – FOUNDER AND CEO

Leslie Carothers is the Chief Executive Officer and founder of The Kaleidoscope Partnership – a social media agency for the home furnishings and related industries. She has been involved with the furniture business for the past 28 years and prior to that she was involved in real estate investment banking.

The first 20 years of her furniture career were spent selling to and designing for the high end furniture consumer with such companies as Roche Bobois, Cantoni and Scan Design. Her design work was featured twice in the Houston Chronicle and she designed a series of very large projects in both Houston and Mexico over her 20 year design career.

Eight years ago, in 2002, she left furniture retailing to found The Kaleidoscope Partnership. In its initial years, her business was focused on providing on site, design based sales training and one on one coaching of sales associates for national retailers. In this capacity, her program was used by over 36 retailers nationwide and she gained a deep understanding of the retail sales associate and the needs and concerns of the retail store owners and buyers.

In 2005, her program was endorsed by manufacturers who saw a need to help their in-house reps provide value added services to their dealers. Hooker Furniture and American Leather were two large manufacturers who endorsed her program to their dealers. As a result of this experience, she gained a deep understanding of the concerns of two more key stakeholder groups- furniture reps and the concerns of each division head within a large manufacturer.

Concurrent with her expanding knowledge of these stakeholder groups was her interest in the internet. Understanding that this would become an important part of the future of retailing and hearing the interest from her clients, she diligently applied herself to meeting the providers of software services and understanding their offerings so she could provide guidance to her clients. Through her friendships with the software providers, she was able to understand the concerns of this stakeholder segment as well.

In 2008 she made a business decision to turn the *kaleidoscope* of her business to focus solely on the internet and since that time she has been providing social media related services to her clients. Because of her deep understanding of all the key stakeholder groups within the furniture industry and how they interrelate, her social media business has flourished .

The Kaleidoscope Partnership now provides social media services to a division of the largest privately held company in the United States, Cargill ‘s BiOH Polyols division, a Top 100 retailer, Gardner White Furniture in Michigan, George Little Management’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF2010) along with a host of smaller retailers, manufacturers and suppliers to the furniture industry.

For the past 5 years, she has written Furniture Today.com’s online  “Retail Ideas” blog and also wrote the series, “Technology, Social Media and Retail” for Furniture World magazine during 2008 and 2009.

She is also an international speaker on social media having been the keynote presenter at High Point University’s April 2010 Social Media Symposium. She was the World Market Center Las Vegas’s featured speaker with Kathy Ireland as her co-presenter in Oct. 2009 and the featured speaker for Ashley Furniture’s national marketing meeting in Oct. 09. A full list of her recent speaking engagements can be found here: http://lesliecarothers.extendr.com

The Kaleidoscope Partnership is a corporate member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council and Leslie was honored to serve as a volunteer on the board of directors of Women In The Home Industries Today – WITHIT – an international non-profit dedicated to the professional development of women in the home industries, from 2007-2009, where she chaired their national Leadership Education Conference in 2007 and 2008 and was National Membership Chair in 2009. She was presented with WIHTit’s President’s Award at the 2009 WOW awards for her contributions to WITHIT and to the furniture industry as a whole.

In her spare time she loves to explore, travel, write, take pictures, eat the occasional pancake with good friends, and read books – the kind that you buy from an independent bookseller…and not off the internet…