W. & J. Sloane
W. & J. Sloane was a famous furniture and rug store in New York City that catered to wealthy customers.
The company was founded as a rug importer and seller in 1843 by William Sloane, a recent immigrant from Kilmarnock, Scotland, a town famous for weaving fine carpets and rugs. In 1852 his younger brother John W. Sloane joined the firm, and it was renamed W. & J. Sloane. It was the first company to import oriental carpets into the United States, and soon expanded to include other home furnishings. The retailer quickly became the choice of the elite in New York. In the late 1800s the company added an antiques department, started producing furniture, and became the first home furnishings store in the country, billing itself as "W. & J. Sloane Interior Decorators and Home Furnishers."
In 1891, W. & J. Sloane incorporated and set the national decorating taste of the United States, and over the next sixty years decorated the homes of the most prominent people in the country, including the Breakers and the White House, created Hollywood movie sets, and even designed and decorated interiors of automobiles. Sloane's opened a branch in San Francisco, California originally to furnish pavilions at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, and later acquired other upscale firms such as the California Furniture Company. In 1925 the Company of Master Craftsmen, a subsidiary was founded by William Sloane Coffin, Sr. to create colonial revival furniture, but prior to that time Sloane's had contracts with U.S. furniture makers that had limited retail outlets to make furniture and home furnishings to the firm's design specifications.
In 1955, after a three-year internal struggle, control of the firm left the hands of direct Sloane descendants when Benjamin Coates, 37, was elected president and the Sloane grandsons, W.E.S. Griswold, Jr. and John D. Sloane, left the board. Coates was a financier who married John D. Sloane's daughter in 1944 and served on the board. After the store left family hands, it over-expanded and lowered the price and quality of its goods. It was later acquired by Hollywood-based RB Furniture, which filed for bankruptcy on September 11, 1985.
