Source: http://www.nytimes.com/1976/08/22/archives/for-oriental-rugs-its-always-on-sunday.html
Oriental rugs always sell better on Sunday than any other day of the week.
At least that is the experience of importers and retailers who have been at it for as long as 12 years and even managed to hold sales in some cities and states where blue laws bar store openings on the Sabbath.
Now that New York’s blue law has been set aside, Sunday rug sales are expected to increase.
“Sunday is a big ticket day for us” said William Jackey, general merchandise manager of W. & J. Sloane. During the last four years, Sunday rug sales sponsored by Sloane’s have been held in hotels and at the Fifth Avenue store.
Sloane’s Sunday event, held last weekend at the Statler Hilton hotel, was the only one of six this year scheduled away from the store. Some $4 million worth of exotic rugs priced to sell from $500 to $10,000 were stacked like pancakes, wall to wall on the ballroom floor.
Actually Sloane’s had resisted Sunday rug sales for years before taking the plunge in 1973. By then rug shoppers were already in the habit of making the rounds of the New York hotels where Sunday sales had been going on since 1964.
“It was those hotel auctions that forced us into it,” Mr. Jackey conceded. The store sales proved so successful—grossing “well into six figures each time”—that the store increased the number of such events from four to six a year and the practice spread to its Atlanta and Philadelphia (Jenkintown) stores, too.
The auction phenomenon occurred in a period of surging sales in which imports of handknotted weavings from Iran (the largest producer), India, Pakistan and Turkey skyrocketed. The total value of such imports rose from $9 million in 1964 to $16 million in 1971 and $32 in 1975, according to the latest United States Bureau of Census figures.
And although prices rose in that period, rug imports did too—climbing from 5 million square feet in 1964 to 10.4 million square feet last year.
At conventional auctions where the mystique of period orientals continues, a record was set recently in sharp bidding at Sotheby Parke Bernet in London. The 16th century north Persian shrub carpet that was knocked down for $115,630 eclipsed the old mark of $112,500 paid in 1928 at Christie’s by Duveen, the late art dealer.
The person most responsible for the auctionitis that still grips the oriental rug market is Nader Ghermezian of the Iranian Brotherhood of Rugweavers Inc. who holds forth most Sundays at the Waldorf Astoria hotel mesmerizing audiences of up to 800 with his glib chatter and entertaining chant. The rugs he sells range from $5 to $26,000 with the bulk of them in the $300 to $2,000 category.
Mr. Ghermezlan’s auction career dates back to 1961 when he began public sales of orientals in Toronto. By 1964 he was auctioning here. What began as an occasional event now represents about 40 auctions a year in New York alone.
“Today, even in Pittsburgh where blue laws keep us from selling on Sundays,” Mr. Ghermezian says, “we catch our shoppers by exhibiting the rugs on Sundays and auctioning them on Mondays.”
RITA REIF
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