Have a seat: Jules Seltzer Associates' furniture dealership has survived challenges by emphasizing quality workmanship in the face of cheap imitations.

IN the mid-1930s, Jules Seltzer was an up-and-coming trial attorney in Los Angeles, but a severe car accident forced him to abandona career arguing cases in court. Casting around for options, Seltzer spotted a craftsman-style chair in a store window on Sunset Boulevard and decided to go into the furniture business.

Nearly 70 years after its founding, Jules Seltzer Associates is still on Beverly Boulevard, right near Furniture Row on Robertson Boulevard. It is still owned by the Seltzer family, and it is still selling furniture designed by Herman Miller, a Charles Eames disciple whose work wowed Seltzer 70 years ago.

"We're the oldest continuous dealership selling Herman Miller furniture west of the Mississippi," said Grant Seltzer, Jules' son, who co-owns the store with his wife, Linda.

Surviving that long has not been easy.

When Grant Seltzer returned to the family business in 1991 after a stint at a furniture manufacturer, showroom sales were slowing to a crawl. In order to survive, Seltzer started a new business in which orders were taken to fill entire buildings or office suites as companies expanded or consolidated.

"We were right at the cutting edge of the movement towards bringing design-name furniture into the workplace," Seltzer said.

The commercial business boomed through the 1990s, eventually accounting for nearly two-thirds of sales. Retail purchases make up another 20 percent, while sales to movie studios for offices and sometimes for on-set props comprise the remaining 10 percent.

In many cases, interior designers are the main customers, procuring the furniture for their residential and commercial clientele.

But with the dot-com crash and recession that followed, the bottom fell out of the commercial furniture business--and many of those $800-plus Herman Miller Aeron chairs were sold off as surplus.

By 2003, the nationwide market for commercial furniture declined by 35 percent, to $8 billion from $11 billion in 2000, forcing a number of retailers to close their doors.

"It has been a real brutal time," said Tom Westfall, owner of Westfall Commercial Furniture in downtown L.A. and a competitor to Jules Seltzer. "Only in the last couple of months have we seen things start to mm around."

Jules Seltzer has managed to keep revenues steady the past couple of years, at around $14.5 million. The saving grace has been the popularity of modern classical furniture by name designers like Eames, Miller or Florence Knoll.

Name-design craze

"This whole thing has really exploded in the last eight years or so," Seltzer said. "It has really become the decade of name-design modern classical furniture. People are now redoing their homes with it and insisting on it for their home offices."

One of the biggest challenges has been competing with sellers of "knock-off' furniture. It costs upwards of $10,000 to furnish a room with name-design pieces and up to $30,000 to furnish a modest-sized office suite, so the lure of companies selling similar pieces for a fraction of the cost is strong.

"The average person can barely tell the difference between a cheap chrome finish and a quality finish, which is why this is such a threat," Seltzer said. The only way to combat this is through educating customers, he said.

Seltzer has held onto the core customers, notably interior designers, on the strength of that emphasis on quality.

Christopher Grubb, president of Arch-Interior Design Group in Beverly Hills, said he has been ordering furniture for commercial and residential clients from Jules Seltzer for about a dozen years. "The originality and quality of what they sell is amazing," Grubb said.

While it may cost more than the cheaper imitations, Grubb said the furniture lasts a long time. "You're most definitely getting what you pay for," he said.

Now that the commercial side of the business is beginning to pick up, Grant Seltzer said he's preparing to roll out two projects long on hold: distribution of a sales catalogue and an online sales component.

"We want to be known as the destination place for name-design modern classical furniture," Seltzer said.

In addition, the company is preparing a line of furniture accessories, including clocks, mantelpieces and lamps, working with many of the same furniture designers.

Over the long term, a challenge of a different sort awaits the company. So far, all four of Grant and Linda's children have chosen to go into different fields. As a result, the family ownership of the company is likely to end with Grant, who is 66, and Linda, who's in her early 50s.

"I'm not too concerned about this," Grant Seltzer said. "We have some good young people with the company that we are grooming to run the company after we retire. I'm confident the logo of the company will still have my father's name in it."

PROFILE

Jules Seltzer Associates

Year Founded: 1937

Core Business: Selling design-name classical modern furniture to corporate and individual customers

Revenues in 2002: $14.3 million

Revenues in 2003: $14.7 million

Employees in 2002: 25

Employees in 2003: 25

Goal: Near-term, start up e-commerce and catalog sales; longer term, show the best furniture

Driving Force: Desire of companies and individual homeowners for quality contemporary furnishings by name designers