This month's retail profiles: Hemphill's Rugs & Carpets, Cleveland Lighting

HEMPHILL’S RUGS & CARPETS has been providing rugs, carpeting and flooring to the waterfront homes, hilltop haciendas and gated communities of Orange County, Calif., since 1995.

Owner and California native Brett Hemphill started the business following several years of rug retailing on the East Coast, preceded by his graduation from college and earlier years spent working in the family’s retail shoe business. "I had just graduated from USC (1988) with a degree in business when I got a job offer from my brother’s fraternity advisor, Joe Steele, to start and run a spin-off carpet and rug store from Carolina Furniture in Williamsburg, Va.," he said.

After managing Carolina Carpets for six years, Hemphill decided to move back to Southern California to start his own floor covering business. In 1995, he opened 2,700-sq.-ft. Hemphill’s Rug & Carpets in Costa Mesa, in the heart of Orange County.

Like everyone else, his business has been challenged by the economic downturn, but things have improved and overhead is in line. "We have seen some of our competitors disappear because they didn’t react quickly enough or at all." Read more about Hemphill’s Rugs & Carpets here.

In mid-November, CLEVELAND LIGHTING, a 15-year-old destination for lighting, art, furniture and accessories, invited friends and customers to the grand opening of its new showroom on Mayfield Road in Lyndhurst, Ohio.

The celebratory event marked a new beginning for the retail establishment, which nine months earlier was destroyed in the early morning hours by a massive fire. The fire, occurring on Feb. 15, 2009, left nothing undamaged and total loss was estimated at around $2 million.

"The fire happened around 1 a.m. on Sunday, but staff was at work on Monday morning," Owner Marty Bursky told the Cleveland Sun Messenger in April. A few weeks later, the business reopened in a temporary location up the street where it continued to operate. During the transition, Bursky said not one order was lost, every shipment was received, and customers were still able to select from the company’s full line of product offerings.

"We were down, but we were not out," Bursky said. "We could have just accepted that our business was a total loss, but instead we decided to create something bigger and better." Read more about Cleveland Lighting’s new showroom here.