Robert Levin, new partners, revive family’s furniture business in the midst of pandemic
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If things had worked out differently, Robert Levin would be three years into a comfortable retirement.
Hard times turned his plans on their head.
On Friday, the 64-year-old Mt. Pleasant native celebrated five months of long hours and hard work as he joined his new partners, John and Matt Schultz, of John V. Schultz Furniture, to begin relaunching Levin’s, the 100-year-old family furniture chain he sold three years earlier.
Customers wearing masks filed into 17 Levin Furniture and Levin Mattress stores across Southwestern Pennsylvania and Ohio that reopened their doors at 11 a.m. Friday in the middle of an economic downturn spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.
The furniture stores in Hempfield, Wexford, Monroeville and Curry Hollow as well as five mattress stores in the Pittsburgh area had been shuttered since mid-March when Art Van Furniture, the company that had acquired Levin’s in November 2017, filed for bankruptcy.
Restoring company’s good name
Gene Zilinski, 48, of Wexford was among longtime customers on hand at the Wexford store where Levin and Matt Schultz opened the doors.
Zilinski said he was always pleased with the furniture he bought when Robert Levin operated the family-owned chain. He came back earlier this year to buy his daughter a bedroom set from the new owners, shortly before the store was shuttered.
“I furnished two houses almost entirely from here,” Zilinski said. “I ordered my daughter a bedroom set from here. It was due to be delivered the Monday after the store closed. I contacted my credit card company and got a refund on my deposit. But I think that bedroom set is probably sitting in a warehouse somewhere, and I’m here to see if I can buy it.”
Levin and Schultz said their goal is to build on that kind of goodwill and restore the brand’s reputation for customer service.
It was left in tatters as the chain began spiraling into bankruptcy early this year, less than three years after Thomas H. Lee Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm, bought Levin’s stores and added them to Art Van Furniture, a Michigan-based family chain it had acquired earlier that year.
Crain’s Detroit Business reported the combined furniture chain that reached from the Midwest through Pennsylvania posted revenues of about $850 million as recently as 2018.
Levin said the new owners quickly sold all company-owned real estate at what he said were inflated prices and then leased them back to individual stores. Then came a series of new CEOs, and rumors of financial problems began to circulate.
Levin, who heard the rumors, looked into them and made a move to acquire the chain his grandfather, Sam, founded in Mt. Pleasant in 1920. He announced he had inked a tentative deal to repurchase the Levin chain in early March.
Days later when that deal collapsed in the Art Van bankruptcy filing, he vowed to continue working to revive his family’s brand and reached out to his former employees, sending each a check for $1,575 out of a $2 million charitable fund he established to help those left without work or health insurance in the midst of the pandemic.
He said he has since learned that Art Van kept taking payments and deposits on furniture at Levin’s stores well into this year, in some cases six months after vendors ceased making deliveries.
He still puzzles at how quickly the business failed under owners he thought would carry on his family legacy.
“Levin’s was a thriving business and certainly was in a place to do reasonably well,” Levin said.
But he conceded furniture is a niche business and one not easily transferred to one-size-fits-all templates that private equity firms sometimes employ.
Longtime connection with new partners
That’s why he was happy to partner with the Schultzes to begin the process of reviving his family’s brand.
He said he’s known the Schultz brothers and their father, John, who operate furniture stores in the Erie area and own an Ashley Furniture license in the North Hills, for years.
“I’ve had a long connection with their family,” Levin said. “We were involved in a networking group of noncompeting people in the industry. Over 10 years, we met three times a year. We shared benchmarking and financial information. When I was looking to re-create Levin’s, I looked to them as potential partners. They knew the business, and they are hardworking guys.”
While Levin plans to stay on as chairman, he said the brothers, who are co-CEOs, will oversee day-to-day operations.
Matt Schultz, who recently got an apartment in Pittsburgh, said the last few weeks have been hectic as the partners lined up all the details that went into the first reopening.
“Over the last month, everyone really stepped up and worked as a team,” he said. “Everyone put in a lot of hours.”
Since Levin and the Schultzes shared many of the same vendors, Levin said the partnership helped ease the way with vendors.
Levin said they are focusing on carrying as much domestically-made furniture as possible.
“We’re buying a lot from the Amish in Ohio and Indiana,” Levin said. He said customers will have the option of custom ordering pieces from Amish craftsmen at the Levin stores.
“That’s heirloom furniture,” Levin said.
“We’re focused on building relationships with vendors, staff and customers and reinvesting in the business,” Schultz said.
Compensating customers left hanging
Levin said that’s why he set aside a $10 million fund to compensate Levin customers who were left hanging by the former owners. As of late April, 644 customers had filed claims with the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office seeking to recoup deposits and payments for furniture that was never delivered. Additional claims have added up in Ohio as well.
The fund was part of a successful $25.7 million bid Levin made to the bankruptcy court to buy back the inventory of 32 Levin stores.
Customers who did not receive a refund through their credit card companies will be contacted in the coming days about the process, which includes refunds and transferable credits, as well as a 20% furniture credit on new purchases.
“Our goal is to recapture all those customers,” Levin said.
In the coming months, there may be more Levin stores reopening. But the partners declined to discuss any specific plans.
Robert Levin said his one disappointment is he was unable to acquire the original Levin’s store in Mt. Pleasant. A Texas-based private equity firm bought it in a package deal with a number of other locations, including several in the Pittsburgh area.
“I offered to take the Pittsburgh stores off of them, but they weren’t interested,” he said.
Levin employees, who found themselves out of work when Art Van Furniture shuttered the stores in March, were happy to see Robert Levin back at the helm of the reconstituted family chain with the Schultz brothers.
The tall, thin, bespectacled man who left Mt. Pleasant as a young man to pursue a career as a health care consultant in Washington, D.C., first stepped to the helm of the business at his parents’ request when his older brother, Howard, died unexpectedly in 1993.
This time, he stepped out of retirement to step into the breach.
“You can’t say anything bad about Robert Levin,” said sales associate Mike Vespi of Oakmont. Vespi is among 375 former Levin employees Robert Levin and his new partners have brought back.
“I’m glad he got it back,” Vespi said. “He’s a good man.”