08648. Howard Goldberg, vice president. 609-620-7000; fax, 609-620-0258.

Home page: www.clinphone.com

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Office Furniture: `Pre-Owned’

In times past, buyers preferred new cars to used cars

under any circumstances. Now many choose the "pre-owned" luxury

car, loaded, to the dirt-cheap new car, stripped.

It’s the same with office furniture. Corporations are falling all

over themselves to buy each other out, which results in staff cuts.

Fewer workers means fewer chairs are needed. And fewer desks, wall

modules, and conference tables.

Here’s where "pre-owned" furniture presents a choice similar

to the one offered by car dealers: choose from high-end new furniture,

lower quality new furniture, or high-end "pre-owned" furniture

that has better ergonomics and better soundproofing.

Mercer Corporate Interiors, an office furniture outlet on Brunswick

Pike, caters to the latter market. It buys and sells such brands as

Herman Miller, Steelcase, Kimball, Knoll, and Jofco. It also gets

the occasional unusual piece. For instance, it priced a $10,000 10-foot

solid cherry conference table for $1,500. "Clients come in here

and get top quality stuff, and pay maybe 20 percent of the value,"

says Ralph Finaldi, general manager. Finaldi’s parent company, North

American Inc., does moving, warehousing, warehouse management, storage,

and furniture liquidations. It set up this office furniture outlet

on Brunswick Pike to solve a problem: What to do with the expensive

furniture it had acquired.

"What’s interesting is that they had sales outlets in Manhattan

and Newark, but you had to rummage around in a warehouse to see what

treasure you could find. And over the last few years, due to consolidations

and downsizing, the quality of the furniture they were acquiring was

just too good to sell in the warehouse. It was undervalued, and we

were pushing it out to get rid of it," says Finaldi.

In Mercer Corporate Interiors’ 6,000 square foot space, three-fourths

of the stock is pre-owned. Finaldi has 50 or 60 chairs, two dozen

files, desks, office suites, and sofas — plus inventory that can

come from the warehouse. The firm also does corporate art consulting

and office design.

Finaldi grew up in Newark, where his parents were in the manufacturing

business, and majored in fine arts at New York University. He lived

in Red Bank, working for ad agencies, and as a marketing consultant

for the print industry, he helped companies put together marketing

plans for publications. "Then, with Country Magazines, we worked

with residential developers to dress houses and put together sales

marketing centers." One of his clients was North American, which

is a major buyer of liquidation furniture.

"A couple of dinners and glasses of wine later, we thought that

a real showroom might be the thing to do, and the Princeton market

might be the place to do it."

"With preowned furniture, there is limited quantity, but it is

perfect for a small office or a start-up — and Princeton has lots

of smaller companies. We found that out by asking around among the

real estate brokers and office parks," says Finaldi. "I was

asked to set up Mercer Corporate Interiors as the first retail shop.

We started early in 2002." In just two months he sold 475 of the

500 Herman Miller chairs he had in stock. In his current stock is

a leather top conference table and a turn of the century Manhattan

partner’s desk.

Lawrenceville 08648. Ralph Finaldi, general manager. 609-671-9400;

fax, 609-671-9420.

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State Sales Moves from Trenton

After 57 years in Trenton, the mother/son team of Alma

and 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, and

also does design and planning. The firm’s former quarters, a three-floor,

24,000 square-foot building at 694 South Broad Street, had an entire

floor of used furniture, but much of that market went away when big

box stores began to sell home office furniture of lower quality at

discount prices.

"We are looking to give some competition to Staples," says

Mosovich. Her company has a new line of economy home office furniture

for the entrepreneurial market. "The quality of commercial furniture

that we carry sets us apart from the discount stores. It has a guarantee

behind it and will hold up for years of daily use." State Sales

also carries a wide range of computer workstations — new, refurbished,

and as-is. "There is a dramatic savings in buying a refurbished

station," she says. Refurbishing a work station could mean repainting

the frames of the panels and/or refabricating panels. "But an

as-is unit can be acceptable."

To give the customer an idea of what they would be getting, they put

samples 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 installed

by the manufacturer or the source.

Mosovich’s father, Emanuel Relles, had been one of three original

partners of Central Paper Company, founded in Newark. In 1930 he opened

a branch in Trenton and was amazingly successful, even at the height

of the Depression. He put his daughter Alma to work in the family

firm when she was 17 and balked at her mother’s desire for her to

go 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 the

business. Meanwhile, Alma had married Jonas Mosovich, who was working

at State Sales with his father. Jonas declined an offer to join his

father-in-law’s business in order to stay with his own father, who

founded 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 quality

for the affordable choice.’ For 57 years that has been a major selling

tool."

"There are 50 million choices," says Mosovich. "We have

been in business so long that we know what will work best for the

client."

Road, Princeton Arms Shopping Center, West Windsor 08550-1931. Alma

Mosovich, president. 609-490-9740; fax, 609-490-9767. Home page:

www.statesalesofficefurniture.com

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Warehouses Expand

CenterPoint at 8A, Monroe 08831. Tim Margotta, DC manager. 609-860-9090;

fax, 609-860-9111. Home page: www.grainger.com

W. W. Grainger, currently with 350 people at 300,000 square feet in

CenterPoint at 8A, will move to Exit 7A in Washington. Matrix Development

Group will build a 435,950 square foot warehouse, including 30,000

feet of office space, and sell it to the Chicago-based industrial

products distributor. The move is expected to take place early in

2003.

James Murray, development project manager at Matrix, said Grainger

would use the facility as a distribution center for its Northeast

activities and may employ more than 400 people over time.

distribution manager. 732-329-0111; fax, 732-329-2879.

Petco Inc. is also expanding. It has a 225,000 square foot warehouse

in Dayton, but later this year it will occupy more than half of a

528,000-foot building at Matrix’s CenterPoint at 8A, a total of 307,000

square feet in a new building, built "on spec" at 24 Englehard

Drive. The retail chain store with pet foods and supplies is based

in San Diego, has a retail store at Princeton Shopping Center, and

has had a warehouse at Exit 8A since 1992.

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Contracts Awarded

John R. A. Scott AIA, president. 609-452-1212; fax, 609-452-1943.

Home page: www.cuh2a.com

CUH2A, the largest architectural engineering firm in the state, helped

Rutgers University break ground last week on the $28 million life

sciences building on the Busch campus.

The three-story, 75,000-square-foot structure, expected to be finished

in two years, will be the geographic focal point that connects other

life sciences buildings on the Busch campus. An 8,750-square-foot

atrium, the centerpiece of the building, will host interdisciplinary

meetings and lectures.

The Human Genetics Institute, the department of genetics, and the

New Jersey Center for Biomaterials will all be housed in the new building.

"The history of science is replete with examples of how informal

cross-talk has planted seeds of collaboration that have resulted in

important scientific discoveries," says Dean Kenneth J. Breslauer.

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Biotech Moves

Junction 08852. Scott E. Coleridge, CEO. 732-274-0037; fax, 732-274-0501.

Www.synthoncorp.com

The seven-year-old carbohydrate-based drug discovery company has introduced

a new program, DiscoveryCollections, to make advanced chemistry platforms

available to researchers. Pharmaceutical companies can purchase one

or more of four separate collections of compound "palettes."

Each represents a different aspect of a new technology platform for

drug discovery.

The chirality of a molecule is important to drug development, says

Rawle Hollingsworth, the founder and scientific director. Molecules

used to develop therapeutic drugs typically form in non-chiral, mirror

images of themselves. Each mirror image can react very differently

in the body. For example, one molecule may show a desired therapeutic

effect, but its mirror image may cause significant, undesirable side

effects.

Because the FDA requires that the efficacy and safety of each mirror

image must be proved before a drug can be marketed, drug companies

must go through the costly process of developing batches of chiral

molecules. Synthon’s technologies simplify the process (U.S. 1, May

2, 2001).

08648. Johannes Dapprich, founder. 609-637-0878; fax, 609-637-9483.

Founded in January, 2000, this company aims to improve genetic analysis

by associating individual genetic makeup and drug response using "haplotyping."

Haplotypes are combinations of genetic markers, such as SNPs, and

haplotype analysis is more informative than studies based on individual

SNPs, says Johannes Dapprich, company founder. He has worked at Orchid

BioComputers, done consulting with Praelux, and been visiting researcher

at Princeton University.

He uses a "string with beads" rather than individual beads

without the string as an example of the virtues of unambiguous analysis

through haplotyping. "Haplotyping is the ability to separately

read maternal and paternal chromosomal fragments. Current methods

can only read both copies at once — they cannot tell from which

copy defects or markers (SNPs) originate, and how they are linked."

Top Of Page
Deaths

She and her late husband established the Bonner Foundation and Bonner

Scholars Program on Mercer Street, and she was a founder of the Crisis

Ministry Program. Funeral will be Thursday, July 25, at 1:30 p.m.

at Nassau Presbyterian Church.

Corrections or additions?

— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.