Roughly 20 years ago, an Akron company was fighting to stay alive, operating an office furniture retail store on South Broadway in the city’s downtown.
National big box retailers — Staples and the like — were taking the country by storm.
Today, the business, which began as Summerville’s and now goes by Regency, is growing and is barely recognizable from the earlier company.
It is still in the office furniture industry, though now it imports and supplies products to retailers across the county, including national online ones such as Amazon and Walmart.com.
“I had to do something to control my own destiny,” said Skip Summerville, president of Regency. His parents, Norma and Scott, began the Summerville’s store in the 1940s.
What Skip Summerville did two decades ago was innovate by becoming his own supplier: He started contracting with overseas manufacturers, having them make office furniture — desks, chairs, tables and more — that he imported. Soon, he was selling the items to dozens of other retailers.
Then, 10 years ago, Summerville decided to get out of operating a retail store altogether — the very thing on which the family business was founded.
By that time, the import and distribution business represented about 98 percent of his sales.
In 2005, he moved to the former Ames store on Romig Road, across from the then still-in-business Rolling Acres Mall, where he would have room to focus on developing the Regency office furniture distribution venture.
“I told [former Akron mayor] Don Plusquellic when we came up here to Romig that we are urban pioneers,” said Summerville, who serves on the Green City Council. “Every building on this side of the street was empty.”
These days, Regency products are sold via more than 40 online retail sites, including Staples.com, Walmart.com, Overstock.com and the site operated by National Business Furniture. Regency also sells through independent office furniture and supply dealers.
Summerville’s son Aaron, who is Regency vice president and chief financial officer, likes to call Regency a “virtual manufacturer.”
“We don’t own any factories,” Aaron Summerville noted. “We contract our designs to the factory somewhere else and we import the product and distribute it here on a wholesale basis.”
No factories — but lots of warehouse space. Much of the 100,000-square-foot facility on Romig is warehouse, where on a typical day a steady stream of trucks moves furniture in and out.
“People [outside the company] don’t know what’s going on here,” Skip Summerville said, standing in the warehouse full of boxes of furniture. “We get hundreds of truckloads through here.”
Aaron Summerville, 35, points to a large shipping container and chimes in; “We get about 150 shipping containers [full of furniture] like this a year ... from manufacturers in seven different countries,” including China, Vietnam and the United States, where a relatively small amount of the furniture is made.
Regency employees unpack the large shipping containers, and prepare items to be sent directly to customers, as well as retailers’ warehouses.
At the front of the building, employees involved in purchasing, design, marketing, customer service and other operations sit at desks designed by Regency.
Nearby, new products are on display, such as items in the Niche ready-to-assemble furniture line.
This line includes Cubo storage units — cubes that can be assembled in various ways — as well as night stands, tables and television stands.
With the Niche brand “we are now making furniture for every room of the house, as well as the office,” Skip Summerville noted.
Some of the items have a dual purpose, he said, motioning to a round table. “This can be used for the office or dining,” he said. The Niche “bookcases go from the office to the bedroom.”
A corner of the Regency facility is home to a large photography studio. There, staff photographer Kay Phelps takes photos of the Regency products for retailers’ online sites.
On a recent day, the cars of the nearly 30 Regency employees occupied only a small portion of the vast parking lot outside the former Ames store in the struggling former Rolling Acres mall corridor.
Sam DeShazior, Akron’s deputy mayor of economic development, pointed out that Regency is among several companies that have fixed up former retail spots, reusing them for their commercial or industrial businesses. The city encouraged the reuse by changing zoning in the area, he noted.
DeShazior hopes Regency and the other companies can serve as a catalyst for further redevelopment while the fate of the closed mall is determined. Summit County is in foreclosure proceedings against the mall owner.
Already, DeShazior said, “Regency has helped to bring vitality to the area, creating 30 jobs that have what I call a ‘living wage.’ ’’
Katie Byard can be reached at 330-996-3781 or kbyard@thebeaconjournal.com. You can follow her @KatieByardABJ on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com.