East Bay Express July 18, 2001 Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 By Jennifer Barrios Phyllis Christopher Competition? What could possibly pose a viable threat to a 275,000-square-foot store attached to a multimillion-dollar international chain that is attracting tens of thousands of customers a week? One group of furniture store owners in Berkeley would like to think it has that distinction. When they first heard that IKEA was heading into town, the furniture retailers, all of them owners of independent stores, hastily formed a sort of furniture store posse. It was Patrick Galvin of Galvin's Business and Home Office Furniture who came up with the idea of forming the Berkeley Furniture Association soon after the IKEA Group signed the deal to set roots in the town next door. Galvin was born into the furniture business; his dad began selling hammocks in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square in the '70s. As times changed, the family business changed with them, first toward appliances, then contemporary furniture, then bedrooms, and finally, furniture for home offices. Galvin has been running his office furniture business in a former warehouse on the corner of Seventh Street and Potter for two and a half years. He also co-owns another store with his father on the Peninsula. He's young and upbeat and surveys his warehouse from a beautiful mahogany-paneled office. But Galvin, along with the other members of the fledgling BFA, wasn't always so cheerful. In the beginning, the thought of IKEA, which also sells home office furniture, moving in just down the road made Galvin downright queasy. Eric Gellerman was another early BFA member. Gellerman, who owns the Wooden Duck, a furniture company that makes tables and chairs and curio cabinets out of recycled and reclaimed wood, remembers that when he first heard IKEA was coming, "We had a little bit of dread, like oh God, is the world going to change?" Since Gellerman's store is right next to Galvin's, word of the BFA first spread there, then seeped into the wider furniture community. "The initial meeting was like a scene out of the Godfather," Galvin recalls, laughing. "All the competing mob bosses coming together around the table, all suspicious of each other." But after the group was whittled down to eight retailers, things started to progress more smoothly. From the beginning, BFA members knew that they couldn't do anything to stop IKEA from coming in. IKEA had a lot invested in the East Bay; the company had plopped down a lot of money for the fifteen-acre parcel of land in Emeryville and Oakland and was planning to spend $46 million to construct its building. But if IKEA was definitely going to be a reality, the BFA's founders began to consider how they might change the way in which they thought of IKEA. Galvin quickly recast IKEA not as a menace, but as an indicator of boom times for East Bay's retail. The big store was sure to draw in huge numbers of people to the East Bay, all primed to buy furniture. "A rising tide," Galvin proclaimed, "lifts all boats." The first task, the BFA decided, was to let IKEA's customers know that their stores existed. Soon the loose association of eight furniture stores had begun to turn itself into a joint marketing venture. They created a Web site that advertised the different stores. They published a glossy, tri-fold brochure that included a map showing the location of the eight retailers in relation to IKEA. They even chartered a little plane to fly high above IKEA on its opening day fifteen months ago. The plane circled over the maelstrom of cars and people and boxes, tugging a banner that read: "Welcome IKEA -- BerkeleyFurniture.com." The plane later flew over a Giants game at the newly opened Pacific Bell Park, bearing the same message. The idea was that IKEA was attracting so many customers to Emeryville that there was bound to be spillover, especially of the higher-end customers who might grow disillusioned with IKEA's do-it-yourself style. It's not terribly crowded on a weekday afternoon inside the Wooden Duck on Seventh Street in Berkeley. Only two women are moving between the rows of bookcases, chests of drawers, and towering armoires. The decor of the converted warehouse could be described as functional: the furniture has been put under a roof to keep it out of the rain. A puppy lies prone on a baby blanket near the front desk -- she's one of five that employees bring from home to the warehouse. Like IKEA, the Wooden Duck also has descriptive price tags, but these detail where the wood came from, who crafted the piece, even the ingredients in the paint. All of the Wooden Duck's furniture is made from salvaged wood. Several times a year, owner Eric Gellerman makes a trip to Indonesia to scout out abandoned wood to craft into new furniture. Asked about his travels, Gellerman pulls out a stack of snapshots from his latest trip. These are not the photos of lush jungles or colorful marketplaces that you would expect from a recently returned traveler; his pictures highlight piles of wood higher than a man. "Here's a table leg," he says, excitedly jabbing his finger at a dull pole of wood in the stack. The rainforest can be seen, but only in the background. Similar pictures, poster-sized and framed, line the wall.We squeeze past a stack of ottomans and arrive at Gellerman's office. A boyish man sporting a shock of brown hair, Gellerman sprawls across a leather sofa, which is accompanied by more pieces of recycled furniture -- a desk, a table, a little hand-crafted nightstand. Like the retailers in the BFA, Gellerman too says he isn't worried about IKEA for the simple reason that people who want the furniture he offers won't find it at IKEA. "It's the McDonald's of furniture," he scoffs. "All the stores have the same SKU numbers -- it's worldwide standardized. You can buy the same table in New York that you can buy in LA. You'd be lucky to find the same piece in [the BFA member] stores." (They also won't find the same prices; a recycled bookshelf covered with buttermilk paint at the Wooden Duck easily goes for $500, and at the Magazine, a modern furniture store on the Eastshore Freeway, a sofa can easily set you back $2,000. For the cost of that sofa, you might furnish two entire rooms in IKEA chic.) Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 Back to Press & Product Information