Last Christmas, Dorothy Jensen–a sympathetic, 39-year-old wife and mother from Downers Grove–decided she wanted a challenging new career in interior design.
So she bought one.
For about the price of a new car, Jensen purchased a decorating franchise the way some people buy McDonald`s restaurants. Now she roves the Chicago suburbs in a white Chevy van, the words Decorating Den painted brightly on its sides. In front, her radio is tuned to an easy listening station. And in back, as if she had driven off with a corner of the Merchandise Mart, are 3,000 samples of wallpaper, drapes and upholstery.
”The Colorful Store That Comes to Your Door,” the logo says.
”I feel when people call,” said Jensen, explaining a Decorating Den credo, ”they have done me a tremendous honor by inviting me into their homes. That is a compliment beyond all compliments. So if they want to take four visits to decide on their bathroom wallpaper, that`s fine.”
That mild sell, combined with a truckload of swatches that gives new meaning to the expression ”shop at home,” is part of Decorating Den`s success. So is the ability to steer franchisees to ideal target markets, typically upper-middle-class suburbs where tastes run as traditional as the values.
Subdivisions in particular are prized territory. ”People who move into a subdivision–it`s something they`ve aspired to,” said Cinda Borling, 37, a new franchise owner and former teacher in south suburban Orland Park. ”They look around and say, `I would like to be like these people who live here.`
They want to have nice window treatments. They want to have nice furniture.” The idea of franchising a roving decorator`s showroom came to Steven C. Bursten in 1970, when he was a traveling fabric salesman in small Midwestern towns. He found that his customers treasured decorating advice but did not know where to find ”someone affordable, someone pleasant” to guide them through their purchases, Bursten said.
He based his company in Indianapolis and quietly sold about 150 franchises over the next 15 years. But Decorating Den kept a low profile until November, 1984, when James S. Bugg, a franchise whiz who helped put Century 21 on the real estate map, came in as president.
Last year, under Bugg`s aggressive marketing plan, the number of franchises doubled; today there are 350 scattered through 40 states, including 15 in Illinois. This year, working from their new corporate headquarters in Bethesda, Md., Bursten and Bugg hope to sell 300 more at $15,500 each.
Meanwhile, with each sale, another carpeted white van rolls out to patrol the suburbs, haunting the newest subdivisions and bearing ”treatments” for the windows, walls and floors of the undecorated.
Franchise owners make a profit by ordering clients` drapes, sofas or fabrics at a discount, then marking up the price. The 3,000 samples in the back of each van come from company-approved suppliers, though decorators can use their discount privileges anywhere, including the Merchandise Mart.
Advice, however, is free, and franchise owners learn to give it unstintingly. It usually pays off, Jensen says, because a client who spends two hours comparing French-pleated drapes to barrel-pleated drapes and buys nothing may still pass her name on to a friend.
Jensen first heard of Decorating Den when she responded to a tiny ad in her local newspaper. For 16 years she had been a full-time homemaker, and when she made the phone call and asked about the franchise, she felt something stir inside.
”It just wouldn`t leave me,” she said. ”It haunted me as if I should pursue it.”
To the regional Decorating Den office in Oak Brook, Jensen looked like a winner. She had a flair for color, a warm personality and an easy, attentive way of listening.
Everything else, regional director Greg Morse explained, could be learned.
Jensen and her husband Sherman, a project manager in the construction industry, bought the franchise last December. For $285 a month, they leased a white Chevy van that had been customized to Decorating Den`s specifications. For $400, a local worker painted the company name on the doors.
Then the crash course began, a week-long decorating seminar in Dallas that crammed in the essentials: how to balance the books, measure a room, order shades to fit and drapes with the right amount of pouf.
That done, the company helped Jensen throw a grand opening party for 100 friends and neighbors. When the party was over, she had her first six jobs.
Jensen still attends the company`s free weekly clinics at regional headquarters in Oak Brook, to keep up her education. If a decorating or bookkeeping problem trips her up, she can get answers here, too.
”If you do everything we learned in the classes, you can`t go wrong. You can`t,” Jensen said. ”If you measure it properly, if you order it properly, if you handle the customers properly and help them in every which way, it will work–flawlessly.”
One humid July day, she steered her van into a new subdivision in Niles and pulled up punctually in front of a Tudor-style home. Her clients, Judy and Tony Hyatt, have lived here with their three children for 1 1/2 years. Now they want every room papered and decorated.
Judy Hyatt likes soft, carefully controlled colors such as off-white and beige. Her living room, when it is finished, will be as frosted and inviolate as the wedding cake in a baker`s window. She has told Jensen that ordering two new chairs in mauve velvet–if indeed she decides to do so–”will be the boldest thing I`ve ever done.”
Indeed, Jensen`s clients in Downers Grove and Niles have proved to be
”basically very traditional. That`s not what I expected,” she said. ”I expected a trendy group of people into country decorating. But they`re traditional, with a smattering of contemporary.”
On this day, Jensen and Hyatt were perched on the edge of the tub in a master bath, mulling over wallpaper for that room. Hyatt was now on a mauve bent, thumbing through some delicate floral patterns.
”Tony might not like the color,” she said finally.
Jensen offered to lend her the paper samples over a weekend, for Hyatt`s husband to see.
Hyatt looked at the mauve prints again and declared that she was settled. Then her eye was caught by a navy blue print, and she began glancing from the new print to the wall.
”You`re think-ing,” Jensen sang.
The visit lasted about an hour. Hyatt tentatively decided on the mauve velvet chairs for $600 each, plus a penalty for not using the manufacturer`s own fabric. She held on to the wallpaper book.
So far the Hyatts have spent $4,300 on decorating, including wallpaper for five rooms, draperies for two, extra fabric for future reupholstering, and labor. This puts them well above the average customer, who spent $884 last year, the company claims.
To clients like Hyatt, Jensen is a friendly, unhurried adviser. But to such professional groups as the American Society of Interior Designers she is one of the scorned, a ”housewife decorator.”
The ASID demands several years of schooling and experience, including a working knowledge of building and safety codes, wiring, plumbing and architecture, before it grants full membership. Over the years it repeatedly has come out against designers who lack this degree of expertise. ”They are presenting a designer who has had their training, which is one week,” Janet Schirn, a Chicago designer and national ASID president, said of Decorating Den, ”so we can hardly endorse those people.”
Jensen`s clients do not appear to care. They are keeping her so busy that her franchise already is self-supporting, and next year she may hire a decorator to assist her. Indeed, this is how franchisees can get rich: One Florida man, the owner of two franchises staffed with decorators, bookkeepers and receptionists, had sales of $1 million last year.
