Storied · 1956 – 2026
Seventy Years, One Family
Seven decades of Bradens Furniture in Knoxville — from a wholesale house downtown to East Tennessee’s home for design — and the fifty years Gary Braden spent leading it.
Born Wholesale
Braden’s was established on May 1, 1956, by McKinley and Mildred Braden — two children of the Great Depression shaped by the Second World War — McKinley a Seabee in the South Pacific, Mildred doing her part on the home front — who came home to East Tennessee and set out to build something of their own. When the Knoxville hardware store where McKinley worked burned in 1950, he took a lower-paying traveling salesman’s job in the furniture trade. Six years later, with twenty-four hours left before a financing deadline that should have ended the dream before it began, an investor named Mr. Williams appeared almost out of nowhere — and Braden’s Wholesale Furniture Co. opened its doors. Gary has a name for moments like that one, borrowed from his friend, the missionary Doug Anderson: the debris of miracles in our lives.
For more than three decades, Braden’s was a true wholesale house. From a designer showroom in downtown Knoxville, a traveling sales team supplied independent furniture stores across seven states — small retailers who staked their names on what McKinley and Mildred shipped them.
Wholesale is an unforgiving teacher. It taught us to buy right, to know what a piece is truly worth, and to price it honestly — because our customers were merchants who knew the difference. When Braden’s became a retailer, we never unlearned it. That value-driven mindset still decides what we put on our floor and what we ask for it, seventy years on.
Its very existence was a most improbable occurrence… a miracle.
Gary Braden, on the founding of Braden’s
Fifty Years, Across a Growing Knoxville
Gary Braden had been going to furniture markets since he was seven years old. He signed a football scholarship with the University of Tennessee in 1973, joined the family business full time in 1977, and when McKinley stepped away in 1980 to lead Knoxville’s United Way, found himself — at twenty-five — running the company. He would lead it for the next five decades.
The story of those decades is written across the map of Knoxville. The downtown showroom where it all began. Fowler Brothers, the beloved Knoxville furniture name the family acquired in 1982. The 110,000-square-foot Fowlers Furniture Center the family built in Windsor Square in 1989 — then Knoxville’s largest furniture store. An import venture supplying dealers across the Southeast. Sevierville and the cabin country of the Smokies. The Maryville warehouse that still anchors our delivery and clearance operations. And in time, Turkey Creek — where a growing Farragut and West Knoxville were headed, and where Braden’s consolidated everything it had learned under one roof.
Not all of it was triumph, and Gary has never pretended otherwise. A trusted manager walked out in 1992 and took the downtown staff with him. The Great Recession took seventy percent of downtown sales, and rather than walk away from what they owed, Gary and Karen sold their dream home and honored every debt. In 2010, a fire tore through the Maryville warehouse. But inside every one of those chapters was a rescue that arrived precisely on time — the buyer who took the big store off their hands, the Stickley executive who answered her phone after five o’clock, the truck that caught fire parked directly beneath a sprinkler head.
Looking back now, it’s so clear to see God’s fingerprints all over my life, my family, and our business.
Gary Braden
Gary told this whole story himself — the fires, the failures, and the miracles that carried a family business through seventy years. Read “The Debris of Miracles in Our Lives” →
A Grateful Farewell
This year, after fifty years of leadership, Gary Braden is retiring.
It is difficult to put five decades into a paragraph. He served as President of the National Wholesale Furniture Association and as the youngest-ever President of the Association of Furniture Distributors. He led this company through booms, recessions, a fire, and a betrayal — and came out of every one of them still convinced that people matter more than furniture. Through all of it, Karen was beside him, building the business and the family in equal measure. And through all of it, he gave back to the city that gave Braden’s its start — in his church, as past President and board member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and through the Knoxville ministries he has served for decades.
Dad — thank you. For the standard you set, for the name you protected, and for showing us that a business can be both profitable and honorable. We don’t inherit a furniture store; we inherit seventy years of your and your parents’ word being good.
— Nick & Alexander Braden, on behalf of the Braden family
The Next Generation
Braden’s is now led by the third generation — and the two of us come at it from different directions on purpose.
Nick Braden has spent three decades in this business. He leads our Turkey Creek showroom and our team of design associates, and he carries the institutional memory — the vendor relationships, the buying discipline, the feel for what East Tennessee homes actually want — that only thirty years on a showroom floor can teach.
Alexander Braden trained in design and technology and spent his career designing customer experiences and strategy for Fortune 500 companies before coming home to the family business five years ago. His focus is making Braden’s as thoughtful online and behind the scenes as it has always been in person.
Different paths, same inheritance: buy right, price honestly, and treat every home like it belongs to someone we know — because in Knoxville, it usually does. Meet the whole team and see the full timeline →
Design, From Blueprint to Home
The part of our story still being written is design. Braden’s today is as much a design house as a furniture store: our designers work with homeowners, contractors, and builders across East Tennessee — often before the drywall goes up. Bring us a blueprint and we will plan the room from the studs out: furniture scaled to the space, fabrics and finishes chosen together, lighting and rugs layered in, everything arriving as one considered whole.
Below is a recent example — a design brief our team prepared from a builder’s floor plan for a mountain great room, and the room it became.
From a builder’s floor plan to a finished great room: one design brief, every piece chosen to work together.
Celebrate With Us
Seventy years of helping Knoxville feel at home
The best way to celebrate seventy years is to start something new. Bring us your room, your blueprint, or just your questions — or come walk the Turkey Creek showroom the way Knoxville has since 1956.
Book a Design Consultation
Est in 1956
With nearly seven decades of experience, we’ve built our name on craftsmanship, care, and a deep understanding of what makes a house feel like home.
Designed for Life
We choose every piece for its lasting quality, timeless style, and ability to bring comfort and character to everyday living.
People first, always
From the way we design to the way we serve, we put people at the heart of everything we do.