Jerry Pair proves showrooms are still vital

0:03This is Business of Home. I'm your host, Dennis Scully. Every week I'll be speaking with leaders and innovators from all corners of the home industry. My guest this week is Dan Cahoon, the owner of Multiline Showroom, Jerry Pair. Founded in Atlanta in the 1970s, Jerry Pair evolved alongside the design industry itself, starting as a small road rep operation and growing into a southern institution. Dan joined in the 1990s and helped expand the business and bring it into the 21st century, navigating technological change, a recession, and a pandemic. I spoke with him about how pricing has changed over the years, why he launched both a leather business and a software company, and why, no matter what changes in the industry, showrooms will always have a role to play.

1:05Hi, podcast listeners. This month, I'm catching up with designer Amber Lewis, a former guest of the show, about her new rug collection for Lalloy. Today, we're talking about how Amber navigates challenging times in the industry. And what's next? The world's a little crazy these days in the design industry, tariffs, inflation, you name it. I'm wondering how you keep yourself focused on creativity and what you need to do. Exactly that. I just focus on what I need to do and I have to let everything else be what it's going to be. Nobody has control over what's going on right now. We're all just riding the same waves.

1:42When it can be great and we can get things fast, like this collection being in stock, let's use that to our advantage. Let's be happy about what we can be happy about. That being fluid and trying to be creative and roll with the punches is literally the only thing anybody can do. And I know that that seems maybe like a cop-out answer, but isn't it the truth? It's the only answer. No, I think that's a great point. And I think back to how your relationship with Lalloy was born out of COVID and that crazy time you and Lalloy have been through a lot. Yeah. Tell me about why the partnership works so well.

2:14Coming out of COVID, going through these times currently that we are in with the tariffs and whatnot, we just have to stay the course. And they're a great partnership to understand that because they are grounded. It's a family business. They're grounded in knowing that, OK, what we started is still the objective here. We're still all objectively designing into something that we believe in that's going to grow both businesses and that's going to get us through these funky times. To learn more, visit LeloyRugs.com. That's L-O-L-O-I rugs.com. Now, on with the show. What is it in your mind that makes ADEC such a successful design center?

2:59I was certainly struck when I was there recently, and you and I got to spend some time by just how much seemed to be going on. I gather there's lots of designers that have offices in ADEC or very near ADEC, and that certainly seems part of it. But what's ADAC doing that some other design centers around the country don't seem to be doing? I think a lot of it has to do with the proximity to the design offices itself. ADAC is not in a business district. It's in a residential district. And it's in Buckhead. And most of our top designers live, work within a five-mile proximity of the design center.

3:36So that makes it very, very easy for them to shop and to participate in all the events. And John Portman, who built the building and was the original owner of the building, was very committed to the interior design field. And he personally put himself out there to bring in tenants and to make the building relevant. And I think that's carried over. You know, we've been there for 60 years, if you can believe it. I think we could have bought the whole design center by now, but that's another story. But yeah, we were there on the ground floor in a little tiny, you know, space that was long and narrow.

4:14And that was the beginning in 1970. You know, it has transformed enormously in the last 60 years, you know, could use a few more windows, but basically, it's a pretty nice place. Well, I mean, as you say, it's interesting that Jerry Payer started way back in 1970, I guess, in the very early days of this design center. And also the early days of this, it's interesting what an important market Atlanta and the Southern Territory has become. It wasn't always the case. It was once a much smaller market. Tell us about that, Dan. Well, it's interesting because I think the South has always been sort of the most enthusiastic community for design in the country.

5:00I don't think that that has ever changed. What's changed is the massive influx of wealth and population in the Southeast, which has made it a much bigger business. Way back in the day, there were a handful of designers in every little market that were really successful because they were attached to a furniture store or an antique shop or something like that. And so when you would go to Memphis or Nashville or Charlotte, things like that, there were three or four designers that were doing the level of work to buy the product that we were selling. because we're selling. We've always been in the high-end fabric, textile, wall-covering leather business.

5:39And so what's happened is as the Southeast has become more desirable and we've gotten this population influx and Fortune 500 companies have just flooded into the area, there's been a lot more wealth. And so there's a lot more growth in the interior design industry. And we have all these secondary markets that are really flourishing. Yeah, interesting. I really wanted to sort of help people understand the early days of because I feel the early days of Jerry Pair and this enormous now showroom business in Atlanta and Florida is as much a story about Jerry Pair as it is about the early days of the industry.

6:18And as you were just describing, as we talked about recently, Jerry was sort of, and others, I gather, were sort of out on the road calling on people in different territories. So where's the best place to get into the story of Jerry Pair in the very beginning of this business? Well, the truth is that Jerry started off as an interior designer, and I don't think he liked it that well. And the joke was that he put carpet in Atlanta's most famous couture grocery store. And nobody could push the shopping carts on the carpet. So he was all about the aesthetic and not about the practicality. Hence, he went into the showroom business.

7:04So he had some experience in interior design. And he was aware of the up-and-coming brands that were making a name for themselves. One being Jack Larson, Angelo Dongia. And he went to New York and he talked to Angelo and he talked to Jack and they agreed to give him their product lines for the Southeast. And there were some other ones in there. There was Isabel Scott, Carl Mann. I mean, really, you know, names from years and years and years. They're great, great names. And these guys were the founders and the creators and they were involved every day in the business. And so Jerry created this relationship with them.

7:44They gave him the lines. He came back and he was the road sales guy. And so he would go on the road. And back then they used to go in these caravans where there would be, I don't know, four or five guys. And like one of them would be the decorator's walk guy. And another one would be Brunswick and Fee. And, you know, some of the really old times. And they would go for four or five, six weeks at a time. And so when he opened this tiny showroom in ADAC, he had a showroom manager and that man passed away. I think he was one of the really, really early HIV victims in 1971. And my mother was working in the memo department as part time while we were in grade school.

8:26And so when this man passed away, Jerry offered the showroom position to my mom. So she was the showroom operator and he was the road guy. And they would go like on a typical loop. They would do Birmingham, Memphis, Nashville, and they wouldn't come home on the weekends. They would either stay in a hotel and have like a, you know, a roving road party or they would stay at a designer's house because they were all footing their own bills and they were trying to travel as inexpensively as possible. And back then there wasn't a difference between the southeast market and the Florida market. So then they would rest up for a few weeks and then they would get in the car and they would go down the East Coast and they'd go to Jacksonville and they'd go to Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale and Miami and then Naples and Sarasota, Tampa, and right up the West Coast.

9:14And that would take six weeks. And of course, they always planned to do that in the winter, right? And they would just be gone for a long time selling these products and getting to know all these designers and really establishing a high-end interior design business in all of these markets with all these other firms. And so we became known as a reliable shop that could take a product line on and market it to these territories and get designers familiar with them. And of course, they love Jerry, so that helped. And then my mom was running the show in the showroom. And so it worked out to be a very good partnership for 35, 40 years.

9:56And they were doing the hotel showings, so they set up in a hotel. Well, we do, we still do that to some degree, set up in a hotel and they would all have rooms next to each other. And the designer would plan to spend three or four hours and go in one room and, you know, see five Jerry Pair lines and go in the next room and see the Brunswick collection, go in the next room and see the tech writers walk guy. And it would, and they would spend three or four hours with the designer. And then, you know, they would just keep that going. Well, and so, and meanwhile, back at the showroom. So your mom is running the showroom and starting to staff up.

10:30And in the early days, were a lot of designers coming to showrooms back in the day? Or what was that dynamic like? Yeah, I was pretty active. I mean, I don't know how many showrooms there are now in ADAC, but there must be 80 or 90. But back then, there were only 20. So proportionately, we were getting a good bit of traffic. and um you know we had some classical designers there edith hills and stan topol and carol klotz and and plots that back in the days when it was kind of crazy and you know they had big big personalities it wasn't quite as businessy as it is now yeah i mean that's that's one of the that's one of the laments i have about the industry today i feel like all of the colorful characters you and i were talking recently about robin roberts of clarence house uh one of the great colorful figures of the earlier days of our industry that you and Jerry had a long relationship with, who sort of helped to really elevate the industry quite a bit.

11:34Absolutely. Robin was a character. He was all that and more. He was the grand dame of textiles, and he was the first person to go to Europe and discover all these fabulous brands that were not available in America. So it was Colfax and Fowler and Canovas and Frey and just a host of others and put them all under the Clarence House umbrella. And that's the way that all of these companies got started in America was through Clarence House. And then as Clarence House grew into this enormous textile house, then they realized, well, okay, well, you know, Robin's only buying 20 % of our collection. We have 80 % more, but you know, Robin had such, had such a great eye.

12:20He was really buying the best 20%. Right. He was really editing their collections. Exactly. And their collections never looked better. And he just built an amazing business like that for probably 30 years, something like that, 35 years. And then eventually when their, his business got so big, then they all decided, Hey, you know, we can take over our own business in America. and they started opening their, they started finding their own agents, their own reps to carry their brands under their own labels and sending in more product and that sort of thing. That was really interesting, except the fact that when they did leave Robin Roberts and Clarence House, then he forbade any of his agents that represented Clarence House to go near any of those collections.

13:03So we watched all of these lines walk out the door and we're like, oh my God, Bye-bye, Colfax. Bye-bye, Cannabis. Bye-bye, you know. So you had to stop all your relations with them because of your relationship with him. Yeah, it was a loyalty thing with him. And he wouldn't hear of it. No way. Yeah. And when he would come to town, you know, it was all the bells and whistles. And he would show up in, you know, his gorgeous outfits with his hats and his capes. And his ermine cape. Yeah. and he would just you know give you the once over and look at you and um look at the showroom and you know any utterance of a compliment you're just thank you so much but you know we don't thank goodness we kind of we don't really have people like that anymore but uh it was it he was a he was a character and he was a one of a kind in our industry well and and as you say i mean played such a huge role in bringing so many of these lines over to the to the states and and i feel that that Jerry Pear played such a huge role in in bringing all of this to the to the south and exposing all of this to this market and I don't know in your mind you were referencing earlier on the territories and and I don't know when that got more clearly drawn I feel like I feel like the early days in the business pricing was was a little loose and a little bit on the on the fly uh and uh i don't know i think i think designers models were sort of doubling whatever they were buying it for at the time and i don't know how the i don't know how fabric pricing and and all of that was really figured out in the early days maybe you can shed some some light i don't think invoicing was a big thing back in the day it was like oh well this fabric costs you know 250 dollars a yard and you might need 20 yards you might need 30 yards uh but that's the way the industry worked it was just a pure keystone markup 50 markup but i don't think people charge by the hour very often so it was it was all based on product and then that proved problematic for the industry because it didn't instill much confidence in the you know integrity of our industry when did people wake up to that integrity issue, do you think?

15:20When did that? Well, I'm not sure the ones who were doing it ever woke up. I think they just retired. So a certain generation left the business and with that, their business practices. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, no, because I always heard stories of Robin Roberts. I mean, he just sort of charged whatever he thought he could get, right? And I mean, I get it. If you didn't have the product, who were you to say what he could charge? Yeah. But I don't know if the internet helped when people could look at pricing online or when all of that happened. But it did seem like the early days it was very on the fly.

15:58Yeah. Well, I think they just treated it like they did their shops where they would buy an antique and they would just double it and put it in the shop. So they would just do that for everything else. Right. But the problem was, is that, you know, as people spent more and more money on their interiors and there was no transparency, you know, people wanted to know, okay, well, what are you paying for a fabric or what are you paying for a table or a chair? I need to know more than just what price you're charging me, right? Because when you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on your interior, then I think it's fair to, as a client, to ask, okay, you know, what's your markup?

16:35What's your margins? This and that. And all of that was very fuzzy for a long time. And I think most people have moved beyond that now. Do you feel that that transparency issue has sort of settled down a little bit? I think so. Yeah. Well, we'll get into that more in a little bit when we talk about some other issues. But getting back to the early days, tell me about Dan Cahoon's arrival in the business. Because it wasn't where you went first, right? I mean, no, I was just a kid around it. Yeah. You know, I grew up every evening, you know, listening to my mom talk about the business and, you know, talking to Jerry Pair occasionally about what was happening, what was going on.

17:17It was very exciting because their business was growing all the time. So there was a lot of positive enthusiasm about where the business was going and that their showrooms were getting larger and they were taking on more lines and adding more staff. Yeah. And, uh, you know, I was just a kid in grade school when my mother started working for Jerry and our elementary school football team would play football at the park across the street from ADAC. And so it was perfect for my mother because I could walk from school to the practice field and then practice from like three 30 to five 30. And then when I was finished, I'd walk over to the showroom, but Jerry would never let me in the showroom.

17:57He would look at, look at me in my filthy uniform in my cleats and say, you can just sit right here on the curb until your mother's finished. So I never got to see the inside of the shower for quite a long time. But anyways, so I was exposed to it. No, I'm a little bit of an oddity because I'm a finance guy. I'm a finance major who figured out that I really did like all of this decorative talk with textiles and color and fashion and style. And so when I graduated school, I went into the apparel industry because I did feel a connection to it, but I didn't want to go into the same industry as my mother.

18:38So I did that for six years or so. I was living in Cleveland, Ohio, when I was in that business in the apparel industry. And my younger brother got sick with cancer in Atlanta. And the whole family was going through a lot of trauma, trying to support him and my brother was a bone marrow transplant donor. My mother took a leave of absence. So I quit my job in Cleveland and I moved back to Atlanta and decided that I was going to try to get into the furniture and fabric business. And so there was a showroom at ADAC and there were two ladies that were looking to sell that business. And we went down this path of due diligence and all this sort of thing.

19:19And Jerry was consulting me the entire time. And finally, you know, we've been talking about this for a year. He just said, well, if you want to buy a business, why don't you just buy my business? And so he said, but I'm too young. I don't want to retire. So he's like, you know, if we can work together, right, you can buy the business and we'll work together. And it just turned out to be a beautiful thing. And we worked together for, you know, 20 plus years and we just have had a great relationship all these years with Jerry and my mom. And Jerry's the godfather of my daughter. And now my daughter's in the business.

19:54She just started 60 days ago. Is that right? In what capacity? She is on the fifth floor in Atlanta selling furniture and fabric and wall covering and leather. Okay. Getting to know all the – yeah. She had a little bit of experience in New York working for Cout and Tout, and she was a designer in New York. Oh, interesting. Yeah, she's been up there a couple years, you know, getting her feet wet. And so now she's back. and so the business has been around for 56 years now so hopefully we can stretch it out a little longer well would you would you love that if if if eventually it did sort of pass on to to your daughter and and and whoever else in your family i mean yeah i think that would be amazing because uh it's you know family businesses are difficult to continue and jerry pair has a great legacy great reputation um it's a great business for a woman to be in much it's a easier fit than it is for me how so well just being a straight guy in this industry you know i'm like it's lonely isn't it dan you and i it's hard being heterosexual males in this industry i'm so glad you brought this up it's an issue that doesn't get enough attention it's hard it does have its benefits but But we're not going to talk about that.

21:11But I'm excited for her to be part of the company and really carry on as long as she's excited about it and is passionate about it. I always think there's going to be room for the independent rep showroom business in our industry because there are always new product lines that need tender, loving care. and they need to be introduced and they need to be romanced and they need to be taken to the marketplace. Um, and out of all those lines that we, that we represent or that we take on, you know, maybe 10 % of them turn out to be big lines and, you know, maybe 30 or 40 % of them end up being medium sized lines and the other, the lower 50%, they don't really make it.

21:54They come on board and they're, you know, they're around for a few years and then they're gone. Um, but It's exciting because we're sort of on the front edge of introducing lines and recognizing talent in the industry and deciding whether we think that that's going to be appropriate for our market. And that's kind of a cool job. Well, it's interesting that you frame it that way. And I think that's one of the things that's often misunderstood about the multi-line model. I equate it in many ways to the venture capital model, to your point that you bring in all of these different lines and nurture them and incubate them and introduce them to designers, knowing full well that some of them might not work out.

22:38There just might not be the staying power or the product doesn't resonate. Other people don't get as excited as you might have gotten when you first saw it. I mean, there are a host of different reasons. But then to your point, other lines go on to huge success and then ultimately leave you and grow out and go off on their own. And that's part of the process as well. So, I mean, it's this whole sort of different scale of outcomes that you don't know in the beginning how it will all play out. Luckily, there are some big lines that never want to be in the Sherwood business, never want to own their own spaces, and they end up staying with you forever.

23:16And they're the mainstays of your business. And we're fortunate to have these relationships for 30, 35 years. So who are those companies for you? Let's tell us some of the big lines that have come and stayed. Well, like in furniture, Denison Lean Formations, Rose Tarlo. They might have a flagship in New York and LA, but they're not interested in opening in all these secondary markets. because it's a lot of additional responsibility because you have real estate holdings and you got to hire staff. And, you know, they, a lot of these companies are really want to stay focused on their creative aspect of their company, uh, designing product.

23:58So that's good for us when we have a long relationship with a company like that. Yeah, no, no, no. It's a, it's a great business from that perspective. I'm wondering when you arrive on the scene in 1990, I guess it is roughly, when you come on board, what was the state of things at the time? Had the territories been more cleanly drawn by that time? I know that comes to play a big role in the multi-line relationships. And what were some of the challenges that evolved for the multi-line business? It seems like rents going up was one of the big challenges, but what were some of the other things that you had to contend with prior to the great financial crisis, which we'll unfortunately have to talk about dan yeah i'm trying to forget it we can bring it up you know in 1990 uh the the industry was growing and from jerry pair's point of view jerry pair showroom um we were very much a textile wall covering leather business um and so when i came on board there were other showrooms around the country that were starting to get very heavily involved in furniture and so we quickly decided okay we need to be involved in the furniture business and so that's when we came on we you know we had represented uh grueger espineo before needler owned it dessin fournier when they were new as an upstart deniseling formations we had them back when they were only an accessories company out of la um and an antique shop uh you know j robert scott sally sirkin lewis yes back in the day she was huge and she started off as a multi-line showroom owner in california and design and developed her textiles and furniture.

25:42So she was a big part of our program when we started really expanding in the 90s. So we were looking at just expanding our offering and basically becoming a super luxe, high-end resource to the design trade and creating basically a mini department store for people to shop. And with that came the need for larger showrooms. and then with the larger showrooms, then the design centers kept expanding. And with the design centers expanding, then you had, I would say, more professional landlords get in the business because before it was always kind of a one-off building that was owned by a local landlord.

26:24But then once the industry sort of morphed into this thing where everybody had to be in the same location in every city. Well, it's a landlord's dream, right? That they have all these tenants that are locked into this location and they can't survive if they go out by themselves. So that started to change the nature of leasing and real estate in our industry. And I think even that has come full circle now and it's kind of calming down. Well, I mean, it's interesting. I don't know how Charles Cohen fits into all of this, But at one point, obviously, he had the Dakota. He's just recently lost control of the decorative center in Houston.

27:06But to your point, he had the PDC and the D &D building. And so suddenly you had one landlord for quite a few of the important spaces. And there was certainly a sense that with that came sort of a stranglehold that he would have on many of these businesses who were operating in so many of the key markets. and rents seem to rise quite a bit over time, yes? Yeah, it's no fun doing business with dangling from a thread off a bridge with Charles Cohen controlling a lot of the interior design marketplaces. He bought the Dakota from the Dantos early 2000s, but he owned the D &D building and we, Jerry Pair of New York, was in business from 2003 till 2018.

27:53So we were in New York for 15 years. And then the Portmans, of course, owned Atlanta. But yeah, Charles Cohen was definitely not a positive influence in our industry for all these years because he would leverage one showroom against the other showroom and one lease against the other lease. And, you know, it just became, you know, it was just not a way that you want to do business. You're much better off if you have independent landlords in each market. Well, and you ultimately, as you say, in 2018, you left the D &D building in New York. And I gather that that made sense for you because it wasn't as big a moneymaker for you with the big expense of that showroom.

28:36Well, we had a great business there. We had fantastic lines. We did a great volume. I think we performed really well in the design community, but it was the most difficult market to manage between employees and between dealing with the leases. It just became, like I said, between Atlanta and Florida, it took the most time and made the least amount of money. And at the same time, I had also started Cherry Pair Leather. And Cherry Pair Leather was growing very, very quickly. from launching it in Atlanta and Florida to a year later, we had national distribution at all the top multi-line share rooms across the country.

29:16And so that was taking up a lot of my time and it was actually much more profitable. I just decided that my time was better spent focusing on that rather than New York. And my time there was very worthwhile. This month, I'm catching up with amber lewis about her new rug collection for laloy now that you've launched this great big collection and you're seeing the the reaction to it does it make you already think about what you want to do next with with laloy and and what yeah i mean yeah we've already designed it yeah silly we've literally already designed the next collection like i told you i'm already in the Well, I'm designing into 2039.

30:01I wonder. Well, so I mean, without sort of giving anything away, what, what, what can you tease us with? Well, it'll be groundbreaking. No, I do think that, you know, it's funny. It's like, we're always wanting to again, wanting to do something different, wanting to do something that helps you evolve to the next thing. Unfortunately, I haven't evolved much past what I like. What I like is what I like. But that's also kind of part of the timeless classic way that I design. I'm not trying to reinvent myself every single time I introduce a new product or collection. I want it to feel like an evolution.

30:38I don't want it to feel like here now I'm going to ram this down your throat by this find this idea. No, it's going to be always looking like Amber Lewis designed it, but it always is just going to be evolving, but reaching a wider audience. To learn more, visit LolloyRugs.com. That's L-O-L-O-I rugs.com and now back to the show so talk about the the launch of jerry paired leather and and what led up to that and and and tell us the tell us the story of the whole thing because it's become good a business dan um you know it's it's fantastic um it really is born out of necessity we had sold leather you know since 1970 we used to represent lackawanna leather uh we represented edelman leather um we represented holly hunt leather and there was a time i guess from about 2004 to 2006 where we didn't have a leather line and we couldn't find a good leather line we had tried a couple of leather lines that didn't perform they were undercapitalized or that's the thing about representing lines is they not only have to have pretty product but they have to be capitalized they have to have good operations they have to have people that answer the phone you know that kind of thing those kind of things yeah those kind of you know annoying little things because our industry is full of product lines that are run as a hobby right right and so you know we try to avoid the those kind of product lines but after going two or three years without having a leather line to sell i just decided i think i could probably do this myself so i hopped on a plane.