Oskar Huber's legacy yields to the recession

The portrait of their grandfather still hangs in the conference room, and the family name remains on the building out front.

Yet at the Southampton, Bucks County, headquarters of Oskar Huber Fine Furniture, the Huber brothers are feeling like strangers in their own home.

"It doesn't look the same, does it?" Ron Huber asked as he led a visitor familiar with the chain's flagship store through the showroom, downstairs from the corporate offices.

Gone were the carefully arranged furniture displays set up to resemble actual rooms of a house. The place felt more like a warehouse crammed with merchandise - including product lines the Hubers said they would never have carried, because of the family's insistence on "higher-end" quality.

The sales associates were not Oskar Huber employees.

And the messages - including "Act Now. Selling Out to the Bare Walls" - scrawled in red and yellow paint on the windows and on banners stretched across the front of the store? "Tacky," said Ron Huber's oldest brother, Bob.

The changes are the work of the Connecticut-based liquidation company conducting the going-out-of-business sale for Oskar Huber, the region's latest recession casualty.

"It's depressing," Ron Huber said of the end of what his grandfather, the company's namesake, started in 1927 as a trained upholsterer who emigrated to this country from Germany when he was 19.

Referring to the portrait in the conference room, he added: "It's hard to look at that as we're going through this process."

That "process" officially began Sept. 22, when Oskar Huber - owner of nine stores in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, including three D&D Home Furnishings Inc. outlets added through a merger just last year - filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

But trouble was apparent long before the filing of more than $10 million in claims from creditors, including furniture and fabric suppliers, utility companies, banks and newspapers.

Some of that trouble emanated from expansion decisions made by Ron Huber and his brothers Bob, Don and Glenn - now men ranging in age from 43 to 50, who were working in the family business even as youths during their summers off from school. They returned to it full time after college and took over when their father, also named Oskar Huber, retired in 1995.

In 2000, the sons closed the chain's only Philadelphia location - on Rising Sun Avenue in the Northeast - to pursue a suburban-growth strategy. By then, Oskar Huber had two stores: one in Ship Bottom, N.J., which opened in 1962, and in Southampton, which debuted in 1965.

Stores opened in Cherry Hill in 2000 and in Tredyffrin Township in 2001. In 2006 and 2007, Oskar Huber's New Jersey presence grew by two with the opening of stores in Lawrenceville and Northfield.

By December 2007, the U.S. economy was in a recession, with the housing market showing signs of serious stress. It was not a pretty environment for the furniture industry. If people are not buying homes, they are not spending money on new armoires and sectionals.

But by then, Oskar Huber was deep into plans to add three more retail outlets - the D&D stores in Hatfield, Allentown and the nearby town of Whitehall. The brothers pressed on with the merger in March, seeing it as a way to broaden the chain's "price points" and market reach and to "help us endure in a down market and prosper when the market rebounded," Ron Huber said. They had projected combined sales of $50 million last year.

The Cherry Hill and Tredyffrin stores were aggravations from the start, the Hubers said. In Cherry Hill, many tenants who shared the Route 70 shopping center with Oskar Huber subsequently left, giving a ghost-town feeling to an already drab center that motorists had grown accustomed to ignoring, Bob Huber said.

Early problems attracting customers in Tredyffrin had to do with township restrictions on sign sizes and setback requirements that forced the store to be located too far off the main road, the Hubers said. Further complicating access to the store was about two years of construction on Route 202.

The Lawrenceville store did not live up to expectations in large part because of newer retail that opened farther north on Route 1, the Hubers said.

In the end, though, it was the economy - and the same sort of factors that have also contributed to failings and near-death experiences in the auto and home-building industries - that led Oskar Huber to Bankruptcy Court, Ron Huber said.

Even in the more-established stores, customer traffic was down 15 percent to 20 percent in 2007 and dropped an additional 10 percent to 15 percent in 2008, he said.

"Not that we were perfect," Ron Huber said. "But in the scheme of things, it was the slowing industry, the slowing economy contributing to slower traffic and sales, [along with] the credit crisis that affected our business [and] our customers' ability to get credit."

Whatever the cause, the end result ranks as the worst experience any of the Hubers have endured, said each of the brothers.

Among the pre-bankruptcy workforce of 200 were people who "worked for all three generations of Hubers," Bob Huber said. "We had to let them go."

Added Don Huber: "It's horrible. The relationships that you build up with your employees, your customers and your vendors is so strained during this time. That's what I think is so painful about the whole process."

Impossible as it seems, the ordeal also has had its comforting moments - compliments of customers and even creditors who have sent the Hubers letters and e-mails of support.

"Keep your heads up high," wrote Kevin M. Stretch, whose Stretch Cleaning Services of Brant Beach did work at the Oskar Huber store in Ship Bottom and was now among the list of unsecured creditors in the bankruptcy case.

In an e-mail to The Inquirer last week, Stretch, who is vacationing in Russia, said he felt compelled to offer such encouragement to the Hubers because at a bankruptcy session with creditors, Glenn Huber "walked up to me, looked me in the eye and apologized. It meant a lot to me."

Stretch added: "I wish them luck and look forward to them coming back stronger."

So do the Hubers, though they are not ready to discuss those plans.

"We're not looking back and trying to second-guess decisions," Ron Huber said, "rather looking forward on how we can make this work in the future."