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A new iPad app could lighten the load of furniture sales representatives at the High Point Market this week.

For decades, manufacturers’ representatives have carried thick stacks of catalogs, sometimes weighing more than 100 pounds, to show potential buyers at the market and elsewhere.

The furniture industry has used this old-school system for decades, along with its age-old designs.

Sarreid Ltd., a Wilson company that sells a variety of furniture, wanted to join a few industry innovators to change the game. So it spent a year developing eCat, an application for the iPad that it perfected with its Sarreid sales team.

Now those weary salespeople are flicking through their product presentations on the sleek Apple iPad, the most popular tablet computer with what many fans feel is a foolproof software system.

And Sarreid has sold the software rights to a new company called SuperCat Solutions that will sell the software to other furniture companies.

Although some industry representatives have used laptop computers to do the job for years, few are as simple — and visually appealing — as the iPad.

“It’s an intangible kind of thing,” Steve Thrasher, president of SuperCat and operations manager for Sarreid, said at a luncheon in High Point on March 29. “The iPad seems to work better. It’s much faster.”

The iPad is a 1.33-pound device that seems to captivate viewers before they even tap the touchscreen.

Thrasher says the new app has advantages over catalogs because:

• It can provide instant updates of prices and products, replacing cumbersome printed pages that are often out of date when they reach the field.
• Representatives can touch the iPad screen and rearrange the catalog for customers by price, category and availability.
• Buyers can interact with the presentation, zooming in to inspect the smallest details in high-quality photos, for example.

Whether in a showroom or in a parking lot, a sales representative can take the order and log it with updated information sent from the home office.

Three companies have already bought custom-made systems, which are priced according to the amount of time SuperCat needs to organize the new information.

SuperCat has competitors, including RepZio, which is aimed at salespeople in a variety of industries. Many competing tablet computers are hitting the market, but Thrasher said eCat is designed only for the iPad.

Competitors use such software as Android. Thrasher believes that, for the moment, only Apple can guarantee consistent performance.

Plus, the iPad is a pretty flashy way to buy a Louis IV chair.

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com