Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508210006
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Long
It's a sign: This is not the most orderly of times.
Phones are ringing off the hook. The warehouse is crammed, floor to ceiling, with stacks of yellow Southern pine. Two women furiously sew futon covers in the corner of what once was their entire work room, while a salesman brings a mother and her college-age daughter into the other side - the "showroom" - to check out the slatted futon couch and the 2-by-4 loft.
Amid the chaos, Rob Dameron issues a calm directive to the person on the other end of the phone: The trucks to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro roll midweek, deliveries to the College of William and Mary will leave during the weekend.
Collegiate Designs, the 14-year-old Dublin dorm loft makers, couldn't be looking at $2 million in sales this year if chaos really ruled. But late summer is the season company president Locke White compares to those times "a tornado comes through."
It's the start of school. The same way a Christmas tree farmer, or a charter boat captain, gears up to make money during one brief burst of the calendar, so it is for folks who sell furniture to college students.
You recall the dormitory loft, once a status symbol among those ensconced in dull yellow cinder block cubicles. Your clever roommate constructed a loft from two-by-fours and raised one of the beds to near ceiling height. You slipped a couch in beneath, and voila! Yours was the hallway social center.
White and Dameron, who met as apartment mates back in their days at Radford University, certainly noticed that phenomenon. White, who was working on a master's degree in business administration at the time, flashed on the idea one day as he crossed the Radford campus. He burst through the door at home, signed up Dameron's architect-brother to create the prototype, and Collegiate Designs was in business.
The first year, the duo peddled about 800 lofts to Virginia Tech and Radford students; their business was boosted, in part, by the support of Tech's then-new housing director, Ed Spencer. He'd just arrived in Blacksburg fresh from the University of Delaware, where the city of Newark banned lofts under its fire code.
Not only that, Spencer's recent dissertation work fed right in to the notion of opening up those dorm cells.
"My area of research when I was doing my Ph.D. was how different kinds of people and different genders react to high density living situations." He learned that the more students could carve out their own territory and create larger, more flexible spaces, the happier they were.
"One of the ways you can do that is with a loft," Spencer said.
At first, Collegiate Designs was seasonal. Dameron, who'd come and gone from Radford as he joined and left the European pro tennis tour, headed for Virginia Beach come fall. White stuck around New River and pondered new products - his avowed passion within the company.
White started to put out regular furniture as basic as the loft. In other words, he realized two-by-fours work just fine for your first coffee table, too. That business was called Casual Designs, and its products boomed in college towns. And White realized: "We were only hitting the students in the dorms. At Virginia Tech [lots of] students live off campus. They need furniture as well."
That's when Casual Designs was merged with Collegiate Designs, Rob moved back from the beach, and the first year of the now-year-round company saw explosive growth. Gross sales doubled, to $515,000. And they jumped 600 percent and 700 percent for a couple of years.
The company, quartered in the Dublin Corporate Center, employs 15 full-time and 35 to 40 people part time during its May through September boom. Barbara Hardin, who has sewn futon covers there for seven years, said the ancillary pieces of furniture, such as the new, mini-PVC-pipe Papasan chair, or a futon couch, tend to be student requests for Christmas presents, fueling orders into December.
In addition to the lofts, futon couches, and comfy round Papasan chairs, Collegiate Designs turns out tables, wood cabinets for stereos or computers, and bookcases. Their prices are lower than others one might find in stores; a tall, five-shelf bookcase, for instance, costs only $39.90 - before shipping. United Parcel Service does a steady business out of the Dublin shop, as do the truckers who head out with lofts stacked in their tractor-trailers for on-site campus deliveries.
Texas A&M is the newest addition to the Collegiate Designs list of clients, which includes 500 campus bookstores, including Radford's, operated by Barnes & Noble. The business presells all of its products, leaving it - with no payments due from customers at all - more financially sturdy as a result.
While clever souls always can pick up a hammer and nails and build a loft, the competition tends to be small. Residence hall directors at regional universities mentioned small operators in Virginia and North Carolina who sell 20 or 40 lofts at a time, but apparently no other company trucks 10,000 through the East Coast and into the Midwest.
"The others tend to be small and regional," Spencer said. "Collegiate Designs started that way, but in fact has become a national company."
And, like its 37- and 38-year-old founders, one that's thinking about life after college.
This fall, the company debuts "Book'Em," a textbook theft deterrent device. Students laminate their names and social security numbers into the frontpiece of a textbook. If the book is stolen and the page ripped out, computerized textbook records will show that when a person tries to re-sell it at a bookstore. But, White conceded, it will take time before folks even know what the device is enough to fear it. And it'll only work if the book has been reported stolen and that theft logged into computerized records.
A similar product, its patent pending, is a photo ID to laminate on credit cards.
by CNB