State Sales Moves from Trenton
Corrections or additions?
This article by Barbara Fox was prepared for the July 24, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Sublease at 9 Roszel
ClinPhone, an electronic clinical trial management firm,
will quadruple its space with a move from 6,200 feet on Lenox Drive
to 25,489 square feet at 9 Roszel Road, subleased from Merrill Lynch.
ClinPhone is taking most of the first floor of the three-story, 111,768
square foot building on Roszel Road, almost adjacent to the Princeton
Hyatt.
Just two years ago ClinPhone had tripled its space. Calling itself
the leader in electronic trial management, with more than 700 trials
in over 80 countries and 60 languages, the firm takes data directly
from doctors and patients and manages data electronically to cut down
on a tremendous volume of paperwork. The new quarters will have space
for a larger training area and for in-house demonstrations of client
systems.
ClinPhone’s Lenox Drive quarters are up for sublease, says Joe Boiseau
of GVA Williams, who with Ken Abrahams represented the firm. The remainder
of 9 Roszel Road is also available for sublease, represented by Raymond
Sohmer of Insignia/ESG. Upgraded features here include teleconferencing
capabilities, interior loading facilities and CAT 6 voice and data
through the building.
“The new Princeton headquarters gives ClinPhone a solid corporate
base in the heart of one of the major global centers for the pharmaceutical
industry,” says Howard Goldberg, vice president and general manager.
A graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Class
of 1977, he has a PharmD from the University of the Pacific (U.S,
June 23, 1999). “We are also actively recruiting for offices in
Chicago and San Francisco.”
ClinPhone Inc., 1009 Lenox Drive, Suite 107, Lawrenceville08648. Howard Goldberg, vice president. 609-620-7000; fax, 609-620-0258.Home page: www.clinphone.comTop Of PageOffice Furniture: `Pre-Owned’In times past, buyers preferred new cars to used carsunder any circumstances. Now many choose the “pre-owned” luxurycar, loaded, to the dirt-cheap new car, stripped.It’s the same with office furniture. Corporations are falling allover themselves to buy each other out, which results in staff cuts.Fewer workers means fewer chairs are needed. And fewer desks, wallmodules, and conference tables.Here’s where “pre-owned” furniture presents a choice similarto the one offered by car dealers: choose from high-end new furniture,lower quality new furniture, or high-end “pre-owned” furniturethat has better ergonomics and better soundproofing.Mercer Corporate Interiors, an office furniture outlet on BrunswickPike, caters to the latter market. It buys and sells such brands asHerman Miller, Steelcase, Kimball, Knoll, and Jofco. It also getsthe occasional unusual piece. For instance, it priced a $10,000 10-footsolid cherry conference table for $1,500. “Clients come in hereand get top quality stuff, and pay maybe 20 percent of the value,”says Ralph Finaldi, general manager. Finaldi’s parent company, NorthAmerican Inc., does moving, warehousing, warehouse management, storage,and furniture liquidations. It set up this office furniture outleton Brunswick Pike to solve a problem: What to do with the expensivefurniture it had acquired.”What’s interesting is that they had sales outlets in Manhattanand Newark, but you had to rummage around in a warehouse to see whattreasure you could find. And over the last few years, due to consolidationsand downsizing, the quality of the furniture they were acquiring wasjust too good to sell in the warehouse. It was undervalued, and wewere pushing it out to get rid of it,” says Finaldi.In Mercer Corporate Interiors’ 6,000 square foot space, three-fourthsof the stock is pre-owned. Finaldi has 50 or 60 chairs, two dozenfiles, desks, office suites, and sofas — plus inventory that cancome from the warehouse. The firm also does corporate art consultingand office design.Finaldi grew up in Newark, where his parents were in the manufacturingbusiness, and majored in fine arts at New York University. He livedin Red Bank, working for ad agencies, and as a marketing consultantfor the print industry, he helped companies put together marketingplans for publications. “Then, with Country Magazines, we workedwith residential developers to dress houses and put together salesmarketing centers.” One of his clients was North American, whichis a major buyer of liquidation furniture.”A couple of dinners and glasses of wine later, we thought thata real showroom might be the thing to do, and the Princeton marketmight be the place to do it.””With preowned furniture, there is limited quantity, but it isperfect for a small office or a start-up — and Princeton has lotsof smaller companies. We found that out by asking around among thereal estate brokers and office parks,” says Finaldi. “I wasasked to set up Mercer Corporate Interiors as the first retail shop.We started early in 2002.” In just two months he sold 475 of the500 Herman Miller chairs he had in stock. In his current stock isa leather top conference table and a turn of the century Manhattanpartner’s desk.Mercer Corporate Interiors, 2901 Route 1 South,Lawrenceville 08648. Ralph Finaldi, general manager. 609-671-9400;fax, 609-671-9420.Top Of PageState Sales Moves from TrentonAfter 57 years in Trenton, the mother/son team of Almaand Larry Mosovich have moved their firm, State Sales Office Furniture,out of Trenton to Hilton Realty’s Princeton Arms Shopping Center,where it has a 1,700-foot office furniture showroom. It sells new,refurbished, and as-is office furniture; it leases furniture, andalso does design and planning. The firm’s former quarters, a three-floor,24,000 square-foot building at 694 South Broad Street, had an entirefloor of used furniture, but much of that market went away when bigbox stores began to sell home office furniture of lower quality atdiscount prices.”We are looking to give some competition to Staples,” saysMosovich. Her company has a new line of economy home office furniturefor the entrepreneurial market. “The quality of commercial furniturethat we carry sets us apart from the discount stores. It has a guaranteebehind it and will hold up for years of daily use.” State Salesalso carries a wide range of computer workstations — new, refurbished,and as-is. “There is a dramatic savings in buying a refurbishedstation,” she says. Refurbishing a work station could mean repaintingthe frames of the panels and/or refabricating panels. “But anas-is unit can be acceptable.”To give the customer an idea of what they would be getting, they putsamples side by side, one “refurbished,” one “as-is.”To see the actual item, a client visits the warehouse. All products— case goods and workstations — are delivered and installedby the manufacturer or the source.Mosovich’s father, Emanuel Relles, had been one of three originalpartners of Central Paper Company, founded in Newark. In 1930 he openeda branch in Trenton and was amazingly successful, even at the heightof the Depression. He put his daughter Alma to work in the familyfirm when she was 17 and balked at her mother’s desire for her togo to college. “My father argued — and he usually won,”says Mosovich. “He wanted me with him.”When he died, at 57, his cousin Leonard and son David took over thebusiness. Meanwhile, Alma had married Jonas Mosovich, who was workingat State Sales with his father. Jonas declined an offer to join hisfather-in-law’s business in order to stay with his own father, whofounded the furniture business in 1945. When her husband died in 1989,she took the reins (U.S. 1, January 22, 1997).His first question, and hers, is always about the client’s budget.”We say, `Let us go to work to come back with the best qualityfor the affordable choice.’ For 57 years that has been a major sellingtool.””There are 50 million choices,” says Mosovich. “We havebeen in business so long that we know what will work best for theclient.”State Sales Office Furniture Inc., 2025 Old TrentonRoad, Princeton Arms Shopping Center, West Windsor 08550-1931. AlmaMosovich, president. 609-490-9740; fax, 609-490-9767. Home page:www.statesalesofficefurniture.comTop Of PageWarehouses ExpandW.W. Grainger (GWW), 26 South Middlesex Avenue,CenterPoint at 8A, Monroe 08831. Tim Margotta, DC manager. 609-860-9090;fax, 609-860-9111. Home page: www.grainger.comW. W. Grainger, currently with 350 people at 300,000 square feet inCenterPoint at 8A, will move to Exit 7A in Washington. Matrix DevelopmentGroup will build a 435,950 square foot warehouse, including 30,000feet of office space, and sell it to the Chicago-based industrialproducts distributor. The move is expected to take place early in2003.James Murray, development project manager at Matrix, said Graingerwould use the facility as a distribution center for its Northeastactivities and may employ more than 400 people over time.Petco Inc., 152 Ridge Road, Dayton 08810. Jim Bate,distribution manager. 732-329-0111; fax, 732-329-2879.Petco Inc. is also expanding. It has a 225,000 square foot warehousein Dayton, but later this year it will occupy more than half of a528,000-foot building at Matrix’s CenterPoint at 8A, a total of 307,000square feet in a new building, built “on spec” at 24 EnglehardDrive. The retail chain store with pet foods and supplies is basedin San Diego, has a retail store at Princeton Shopping Center, andhas had a warehouse at Exit 8A since 1992.Top Of PageContracts AwardedCUH2A, 211 Carnegie Center, Princeton 08540-6298.John R. A. Scott AIA, president. 609-452-1212; fax, 609-452-1943.Home page: www.cuh2a.comCUH2A, the largest architectural engineering firm in the state, helpedRutgers University break ground last week on the $28 million lifesciences building on the Busch campus.The three-story, 75,000-square-foot structure, expected to be finishedin two years, will be the geographic focal point that connects otherlife sciences buildings on the Busch campus. An 8,750-square-footatrium, the centerpiece of the building, will host interdisciplinarymeetings and lectures.The Human Genetics Institute, the department of genetics, and theNew Jersey Center for Biomaterials will all be housed in the new building.”The history of science is replete with examples of how informalcross-talk has planted seeds of collaboration that have resulted inimportant scientific discoveries,” says Dean Kenneth J. Breslauer.Top Of PageBiotech MovesSynthon Chiragenics, 7 Deer Park Drive, MonmouthJunction 08852. Scott E. Coleridge, CEO. 732-274-0037; fax, 732-274-0501.Www.synthoncorp.comThe seven-year-old carbohydrate-based drug discovery company has introduceda new program, DiscoveryCollections, to make advanced chemistry platformsavailable to researchers. Pharmaceutical companies can purchase oneor more of four separate collections of compound “palettes.”Each represents a different aspect of a new technology platform fordrug discovery.The chirality of a molecule is important to drug development, saysRawle Hollingsworth, the founder and scientific director. Moleculesused to develop therapeutic drugs typically form in non-chiral, mirrorimages of themselves. Each mirror image can react very differentlyin the body. For example, one molecule may show a desired therapeuticeffect, but its mirror image may cause significant, undesirable sideeffects.Because the FDA requires that the efficacy and safety of each mirrorimage must be proved before a drug can be marketed, drug companiesmust go through the costly process of developing batches of chiralmolecules. Synthon’s technologies simplify the process (U.S. 1, May2, 2001).Generation Biotech LLC, 32 Pin Oak Drive, Lawrenceville08648. Johannes Dapprich, founder. 609-637-0878; fax, 609-637-9483.Founded in January, 2000, this company aims to improve genetic analysisby associating individual genetic makeup and drug response using “haplotyping.”Haplotypes are combinations of genetic markers, such as SNPs, andhaplotype analysis is more informative than studies based on individualSNPs, says Johannes Dapprich, company founder. He has worked at OrchidBioComputers, done consulting with Praelux, and been visiting researcherat Princeton University.He uses a “string with beads” rather than individual beadswithout the string as an example of the virtues of unambiguous analysisthrough haplotyping. “Haplotyping is the ability to separatelyread maternal and paternal chromosomal fragments. Current methodscan only read both copies at once — they cannot tell from whichcopy defects or markers (SNPs) originate, and how they are linked.”Top Of PageDeathsCorella “Billie” Allen Bonner, 93, on July 21.She and her late husband established the Bonner Foundation and BonnerScholars Program on Mercer Street, and she was a founder of the CrisisMinistry Program. Funeral will be Thursday, July 25, at 1:30 p.m.at Nassau Presbyterian Church.Previous StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
