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May 05, 2003
Karazona Walking along Broadway past
Karazona
Walking along Broadway past Franklin Street in Tribeca one sees a handwritten sign offering “Good Coffee” on the sidewalk in front of a cavernous furniture store. An odd and promising juxtaposition.The store is one of three in the immediate vicinity run by White furniture, a business that adds up in all the unexpected and satisfying ways that define New York and forever make the city’s prospects seem a little brighter – even in a time when the decline seems palpable.
White is the creation of Karazona Cinar -- the downtown Robin Hood of vintage furniture -- and his merry band of hip misfits who have collectively managed to build a thriving low-cost manufacturer of high end furniture in New York’s recessionary service economy.
“There’s nobody in this business doing what Karazona is doing,” says Bert Oullette a furniture bounty-hunter who arrived on Friday with a truck-full of chairs and credenzas by famed designer Florence Knoll which he had salvaged from an office building in Canada.
Cinar, who has also had success as an East Village restauranteur, recognized the growing appetite for modern designs when a friend offered to buy his dining room table in 1997 – a table he had acquired at the Salvation Army. Shortly thereafter, he launched a small used furniture store called Lollipop out of his home on Essex Street.
In 1999, he moved the business to White Street just east of Broadway, hired designers, and began manufacturing his own versions of classic pieces by the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, and Isamu Noguchi.
From the beginning, he was able to undercut the market -- which was dominated by furniture boutiques selling original pieces or higher cost Italian imitations – and still make money.
“The industry was kidnapped by art galleries and museums,” says the 37-year-old Kurdish immigrant from Turkey’s troubled Tunceli province. “They think this is only for a furniture elite….We want to bring this design to the public at the lowest price possible.”
White now has 70 employees and 80% of its business is wholesale. It manufactures pieces in factories all over the world, including one that it owns and operates in Turkey and which Cinar’s 73-year old father manages.
”He was a bricklayer all of his life,” says Cinar with an amusement which betrays the free-wheeling, family-oriented mentality that characterizes his business style. “He doesn’t know a thing about furniture.”
Cinar arrived from Turkey in his early 20s, spent two years as a bike messenger, and then another three and a half as a cab driver. From cabs, he made the jump to restaurants, founding Stingy Lulu’s, a kitschy diner off St. Mark’s Place that featured drag queen “waitresses” and quickly became a standard as the East Village took off.
In 1996, along with his cousin Murat Bugdaycay and a friend, Turan Kemal, Cinar bought and revived the legendary after-hours club “Save the Robots” which had been shut down after operating for years without a permit. He sold his stake in the restaurant and club when his furniture business began to grow, and says without hesitation that he prefers his latest venture.
Constantly multi-tasking and capable of consuming 20 espressos in a single day, he nonetheless has the understated style and graciousness of the club owner and restaurateur that he was.
Of his success, Cinar says “it’s all about hard work, being a bully, and pushing it. My wife says I have a small brain and big balls.”
The self-deprecation seems more characteristic than the machismo.
He wears his thinning hair closely cropped and dresses in East Village style: jeans with a vintage belt buckle, a green trucker’s cap perched on his head. On his left forearm is a tattoo of his wife’s name, while on his right shoulder is another bearing the names of his mother and father.
Around him his eclectic staff comes and goes, working with no apparent sign of hierarchy, and all looking as though they are fresh from a long night out. They are mostly Turkish, some African American, at least one German, and they offer each other cigarettes and espresso in a touchingly polite, fraternal manner.
Whether born of New York streets or the highlands of south eastern Turkey, Cinar clearly has a managerial knack for building successful teams with highly diverse personnel.
Cemal Ercan, to whom Cinar rents the café in exchange for a small share of the rent, agrees: “He’s very open minded. He doesn’t think, he just do.”
One does not, however, get the feeling that profits are the primary motivation in the busy office. Some other ethic holds these odd amateurs together.
Behind his desk, Cinar has a green bumper sticker emblazoned with “Kurdistan.” When asked if he was involved in the conflict, he says “every poor kid in Turkey was involved.”
A question about the United States invasion of Iraq draws a thoughtful crowd: Cinar, Nico Haupt, a chain smoking German who is in charge of the company’s computers, and an idealistic young native of Istanbul who says he is against all war. Judging from geography alone, there would be reason to expect conflicting points of view. There are not.
Cinar announces surprisingly that he is “a kurd who was against the war.”
But certainly he’s happy that Saddam is no longer in power?
“Yes,” he says simply, but goes on to talk about the need for a “separation of the corporation and the state,” humorously describing President Bush and various corporate titans as “lovers.”
Such committed populism is appealing in a market-hardened capitalist, and it is perhaps this spirit that galvanizes the staff, lending some greater meaning to their daily work. They all seem to enjoy the game of demystifying the world of culturally-significant furniture.
But there is more than just anti-snobbery at work here.
White now manufactures some elements of it’s various pieces in Asia. When asked, Cinar says that SARS has not yet affected the business, but adds that he has sent a box with anti-biotics and Vitamin C to his partner in China.
It is the sort of telling gesture – like the drawings sent by foreign school children to New York in the weeks after September 11th -- that is at once impossibly small and enormously moving.
White’s headquarters at 353 Broadway are not slick. Densely arranged across thousands of square feet of roughly finished space are hundreds of chairs, tables, desks and couches.
It is a warehouse with a cappuccino maker, and people come and go -- some browsing the pieces, while others order coffee and lounge on chairs that have been borrowed from the showroom by the makeshift café in the front. Despite being rough, the space has a pedigree.
Cinar’s furniture initially arrived in the space on a loan to his friend Michael Auerbach, onetime partner of notorious dot com impresario Josh Harris. Harris used the warehouse in December 1999 to stage Quiet, a two week art party celebrating the millennium. Harris and Auerbach feuded after the demise of their Internet video company Pseudo.com – not to mention Harris’ experiment in reality programming “We Live in Public” in which he installed cameras in his SoHo mansion and streamed live video over the Internet featuring his daily life with girlfriend Tanya Corrin.
As a result of the feud, Auerbach took over the lease on 353 Broadway, but was unable to make a go of his café ideas despite the free use of Cinar’s furniture. When Auerbach’s dreams finally imploded, Cinar moved into the space keeping the store on White Street as a showroom.
Cinar’s forward momentum and informal management style does generate a certain level of chaos. On Saturday morning, one woman waited impatiently just up the sidewalk from 353 as the White crew stood by, helplessly locked out of the third White showroom. Apparently the man with the keys had fallen asleep in the basement, and his colleagues were having difficulty rousting him.
Customers seem to take it all in stride, however, and continue to come back.
Phillip Gesue is president of a development company that owns a hotel in West Palm Beach. He has commissioned White to make chairs for the hotel’s dining room and bar.
“Walk from Canal to Houston on Wooster,” says Gesue. “You’ll see all the same stuff, but ten times more expensive.” Does he like working with White? ”Oh yes, they are very honorable guys.”
Jeff Hall, another customer, agrees: “This stuff is jacked up all over town.”
And few seem to dispute the quality of White’s pieces. Oullette’s partner and fellow bounty hunter Dave Ingraham looks like a cross-between Nick Nolte and Crockodile Dundee. He has driven from Canada with the shipment of Knoll credenzas in Bermuda shorts and a rumpled cowboy hat. When he’s not fishing, he’s scouring New England for modern office designs.
“Karazona makes beautiful furniture,” he says. “His copies are the best.”
In addition to its wholesale and retail businesses, White has established a niche renting furniture to stores as well as to film companies and television programs. Haupt and Cinar say past clients have included MTV, Calvin Klein, DKNY, Diesel, “Spiderman,” and “Sex in the City.”
After a fifty-plus year slide, manufacturing today represents only about 10% of New York City’s total employment. Alarmed economists point to the city’s unhealthily growing dependence on the financial services sector and argue that holding on to the remaining light industrial businesses is vital to the long-term health of the city.
Given that White is a job-creating manufacturing enterprise based in lower Manhattan and founded on New York’s particular strengths, one imagines the company would be a case study for city agencies like the Economic Development Corporation which is charged in these desperate times with promoting growth.
Sadly, there seems to be little connection between grass-roots operations like White and those distant city agencies.
”I don’t know anything about the city,” Cinar says in a way that suggests that the existence of the EDC’s 60-plus incentive programs has never crossed his mind.
Such a disconnect makes one wonder about the efficacy of the nearly $200 million invested by the city in top down, pro-growth strategies -- not to mention other somewhat abstract ideas such as Mayor’s Bloomberg’s recent announcement of the city’s first ever Chief Marketing Officer.
But these are not Cinar’s concerns. For him, the “hardest part is logistics.” Sourcing a screw in one place, wood or metal elsewhere, and then getting it all made into a piece that is affordable.
And he has ambitions beyond the sale of furniture. Haupt talks about their plans to build “pre-fab” homes, and Cinar says he wants to “bring design to the masses.”
More immediately, however, he has to go to Argentina to source some leather. He says that it is “a good feeling” to be able to do business in Argentina where it is desperately needed.
“They are a really beautiful people,” he says. “I like Argentinians.”
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Posted by oliver at May 5, 2003 05:18 PM