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By Mitch, February 12, 2010 9:57 pm

I know it sounds counterintuitive, but Susan O’Brien says that people who live in small condos should be furnishing them with large pieces and not lots of little ones. Susan is a LofaBed customer who has a condo in Québec City, but lives most of the time in New Hampshire.  She writes a monthly article, The Condo Column, for a local newspaper, and recently featured her LofaBed experience in her Furnishing Your Condo piece.

While researching the article, Susan told me some things about condos I didn’t know. Here are some interesting excerpts from that email:

From: Susan O’Brien
Subject: Furnishing Your Condo
Date: January 28, 2010 4:26:10 PM GMT-05:00
To: lofasofa@videotron.ca

Mitch:  We purchased three LofaBeds from you several years ago in QC.  I am now writing The Condo Column for newspapers and am doing one on Furnishing Your Condo.  Hope you are doing well.  Ours has held up unbelievably.  I am leading out the column with a discussion of how your furniture worked so well in 560 square feet. By the way, I’ve learned it’s best in small spaces to buy one or two large pieces rather than a bunch of small ones.

I haven’t read your whole web site lately, but here’s a suggestion for you:  have some space on your web site devoted just to condos.  There’s nothing out there in the U.S. for condo owners, and I feel it is a large untapped market.  Your furniture works absolutely perfectly in a small condo space and, in fact, was made for it because of its multi-functionality.

When I sold the column to the newspaper, I told them I had verified a statistic that 27% of the full-time housing (not counting vacation condos) in the Mount Washington Valley of New Hampshire was condominium.  My editor was shocked to learn it was over 1/4 of all the housing stock.  I tried to get this same information from Portland, Maine, where there are a great many new condos, and found out no one in government is even tracking it!  Imagine how many condos there must be in Montreal alone?  And no one is speaking directly to them.  The key point for you, I think, is to educate condo owners that ONE OR TWO LARGE PIECES are far better than jamming in little love seats and extra chairs.  I followed this in buying from you and it really works.  The LofaBeds in QC actually make the room look bigger, large as they are. This info should be on your web site.  Maybe you could do a “Guidelines for buying Condo Furniture.”   People don’t understand this idea.  My neighbors in NH jammed so much into their space identical to ours I could hardly breathe when I was in there. Awful.

Your product deserves wider exposure.  Not only is it quality-for-price, it solves so many small-space problems.  I guess I’m like anyone else who has found a really great product; I want to spread the word.

Martial arts fanatic Fernando,
Bought into a very large condo.
It was airy and bright,
Ablaze with sunlight…
And perfect for doing Taekwondo.

Mitch Wapen
www.lofasofa.com
lofasofa@videotron.ca
877-424-1431

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By Mitch, January 29, 2010 11:39 am

With seventy fabrics to choose from,
Like Cinnamon, chocolate, and plum…..
We’ve made this collection
With so much affection,
It’s hard to choose one from the sum!

Actually, we have 75 fabrics to choose from, it’s just that that would have been one too many syllables for this limerick.  And you KNOW how I like my limericks to flow!

This whole fabric thing got started around Spring of last year (2009).  Although the LofaBed idea and design is mine, I’ve always deferred to women when it comes to picking out the available fabric materials.  I figure if my own wife wouldn’t ask my advice on fabrics for our home, why would anyone else?  Maybe this is a “guy thing,” and I just have to get over it…I dunno.  In any case, it was the women who ran the factories I’ve worked with, who always chose the fabrics.

But by the Spring of last year, I was fed up with customers telling me, “Your fabrics are ugly!”…..”A blind man could have picked better-looking materials!”…..”What are you, color blind?”  And those were the nicer ones!  What these people were articulating, in their own inimitable fashion, was that it is not a good idea to let a Québecois woman make the fabric selection for Anglophones (English speaking) throughout Canada and the United States.  It seems that mauve and puce, while de rigueur for Québec society, are not all that popular throughout the rest of North America.  Who knew?

And so I went about the task of finding fabrics that EVERYONE could agree on.  I knew what I knew: LofaBed customers wanted microfibers because of their superior strength and ability to repel liquids while avoiding stains.  They wanted materials in basic colors like black, off-white, burgundy, blue, green, brown, and beige. And they wanted some prints (patterns) to go with the solids, so that mixing and matching (2-tone) would be easy.   So I used my experience in manufacturing to find the right suppliers.  Luckily, Montréal is the shmatte capital of Canada, so I was able to find everything locally.  That became doubly important when I realized that the factory was going to buy by-the-cut, at least in the beginning, until they knew which of the 75 fabrics would be popular enough to buy by-the-roll.  By making sure that all of our fabric suppliers were local, I was also aiding the factory in its ability to buy fabric on short notice, thereby insuring that orders could be turned around within a week.  Very cool.

And ever since, no one has told me my fabrics are ugly.  Or too few.  Or, thank God, too Québecois!  In fact, now the problem is people want MORE than the six sample swatches I’m willing to mail!  But that’s OK…..this is what’s called in the trade, a “good problem.” Eh?

All of the fabric material,
Cotton to poly-ethereal,
Is upholstery in grade,
Will not tear, pill, or fade…
And is known to be anti-bacterial!

Mitch Wapen
www.lofasofa.com
lofasofa@videotron.ca
877-424-1431