Latest news with #Jordan's
Boston Globe
10-05-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
As Eliot Tatelman exits, Jordan's Furniture taps MullenLowe as its ad agency
Advertisement Tatelman was not only the star of the ads, he also helped write the copy. Now, that task will be handled by the scribes at MullenLowe. It was an account that everyone in MullenLowe's Boston office wanted a part of, Cartagena said. Cartagena is based in the firm's New York office, but he grew up in Bolton and is all too familiar with the Jordan's shtick: As a kid, his parents dragged him along for furniture shopping to a Jordan's store with the promise of watching an IMAX movie there. 'We had to win this thing,' Cartagena said of his agency's attitude about pitching Jordan's for the gig. 'I knew that if we won this, everyone is going to go out to make sure it's a success.' Advertisement Over the years, brothers Barry and Eliot Tatelman became household names throughout much of New England thanks to their ads, ubiquitous and often quirky. They sold the company to Berkshire Hathaway in 1999, and Barry Tatelman walked away roughly seven years later. 'In a way, they were kind of trailblazers in advertising, especially Eliot,' Cartagena said. 'Eliot was the one writing all this stuff.' Now, MullenLowe has an opportunity to reinvent Jordan's for a new generation of furniture buyers. Cartagena said he expects to watch old Jordan's ads to see what ideas can be gleaned for the new campaign. For now, the details are under wraps: He wouldn't say when the campaign would begin, but admitted that MullenLowe crafted a new tagline for the company that it aims to roll out. 'Partnering with MullenLowe is an exciting new chapter for us,' Linda SanGiacomo, senior vice president of marketing at Jordan's, said in an email. 'It builds on Jordan's legacy of doing things differently while bringing in fresh creative energy to help connect with a new generation of customers.' It's unclear how much longer Tatelman will appear in Jordan's ads. MullenLowe is still figuring out the best way to transition into the new era. 'The last thing we want to do is just go dark on Eliot,' Cartagena said. 'I think you would have a mutiny in New England.' This is an installment of our weekly Bold Types column about the movers and shakers on Boston's business scene. Jon Chesto can be reached at
Miami Herald
11-04-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
A ‘second life' for your old sneakers. Miami company recycles and reuses them
Whether you're a marathon runner or someone who just takes the dog on a walk, chances are you've bought multiple pairs of sneakers in a year. But when those brand crisp new white shoes turn brown, the soles go thin or your toes poke through a hole, they eventually get thrown in the Goodwill pile during spring cleaning or in the trash. Either way, your old shoes are likely to end up in a landfill. Moe Hachem thinks there's a way to give those shoes a 'second life.' He's founded a Miami shoe recycling and reuse company, Sneaker Impact, with the aim of reducing the environmental and climate footprint of the massive athletic shoe industry. It's not a new idea but he's taking steps to address 'waste colonialism' criticism that other shoe and clothing recycling enterprises have faced over dumping the wrong stuff in the wrong places. 'Our team inspects each and every pair that comes here.' Hachem said. 'Every shoe is accounted for. We are prolonging the life of the shoes.' There are thousands of Sneaker Impact drop-off locations in gyms, specialty sneaker stores and run clubs around the United States, including local spots like FootWorks Running, Brickell Run Club and the University of Miami that get sent to its 75,000-square-foot facility in Little Haiti. Every day thousands of shoes are delivered and added to the piles of piles of merchandise, boxes, and bags that stack up to the facility's ceiling. Hachem's family has been in the used retail merchandise business for decades, and there are still thousands of old clothes in the building but sneakers, since 2020, have been the company's focus. The deliveries include the gold standard for reuse and reselling, clean trendy name brands like Nike Air Force 1, Jordan's and seemingly brand new HOKA and On-Cloud running shoes. They all get mixed in with sneakers with holes and ripped soles, which nobody is likely to want to wear again. Every shoe that comes in is sorted by quality and the big 'second life' decision: Are they intact enough to be shipped out and resold or bound for the recycling process, which means cannibalizing it for useful components. 'End-of-life' shoes with worn-out treads or other major issues get sent to the grinding room. Through the shoe grinder One of the biggest challenges of recycling sneakers is sorting out the multicolored piles that come out of the grinder. Many shoes have more than 15 materials, including plastic — and how they're glued together doesn't make them easy to recycle. But with new and more expensive equipment, Hachem expects Sneaker Impact to make a dramatic expansion: from shredding and sorting hundreds of shoes a day to thousands of shoes an hour. The new sorting machine is tall enough to need a step stool to get up to the top to dump buckets of the ground-up sneakers into the opening, and within minutes, it spits out product by color and material depending on what's selected on a touch-screen. During a test run when the Herald visited, the machine was able to spit out black pieces with about 85% accuracy. Hachem said they're still working out the bugs. He's experimenting with using recycled foam and rubber to make new products too. Floors around his office at the Miami headquarters are made entirely from rubber and foam from recycled sneakers. He imagines that rubber flooring might be a good choice for playgrounds while foam might add extra comfort under carpets. Sneaker Impact has also partnered with California-based companies, Community Made and Blumaka, to use the materials to create prototypes of new sneakers, slides and boots that he unveiled for the first time to the Herald. The slides have a similar comfort to Crocs. But the majority of the shoes are shipped outside of the U.S. to be sold in second-hand markets, mainly by boat to Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala and Bolivia in 20-foot shipping containers with 10,000 pairs of shoes packed in each. Shoes that are dirty or have holes but have their soles and treading intact are also sent to be repaired or washed at overseas marketplaces, he said. 'You're not only reducing waste but creating micro-business opportunities,' Hachem said. 'In developing countries, these shoes are a necessity. If a perfectly fine sneaker has been worn for 100 miles and you're shipping it to the right market, we don't think it's the right call to grind it and shred it.' 'Waste colonialism' Old clothing, particularly shoes, are a growing waste problem. Some statistics show that 300 million pairs of shoes are thrown out every year and sneakers can take more than 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill. Efforts to 'recycle' clothes have had mixed success. The U.S. is the largest exporter of second-hand clothing in the world and sends out more than a billion pounds of used clothing each year — but the majority of is unsellable and basically trash, according to the Or Foundation which has played a leading role in documenting fashion waste. 'Waste colonialism is throwing our trash into developing countries,' said Francesca Bellumini, an associate instructor of sustainable fashion at Columbia University who lives in Miami. Over the years, retail companies like Zara and H&M have caught flack for getting paid to send products that litter the global south. Bellumini calls it 'corporate green-washing.' What doesn't get sold from Goodwill or Salvation Army gets baled up and sold to textile buyer, likely to also end up in another country. For example, the Or Foundation found that at Kantamanto, the world's largest secondhand clothing market located in Ghana, roughly 40% of the millions of items that pass through every week leave the market as waste. 'The beach has piles of clothing taller than I am,' Liz Ricketts, co-founder and executive director of the non-profit, Or Foundation, said to the Herald on a call from Ghana. 'We are removing 20 tons of textile waste a week. And we could be doing more.' Ricketts said things escalated for two reasons: low-quality products making up the majority of the supply and Ghana not having the financial resources to build a landfill or incinerator. She described low-quality products as anything that requires the vendor to invest money to make the product resellable. 'If a retailer is in debt and they get a bale of product and they have to wash everything and repair everything that takes money, and they might not have that money,' she said. 'If it's good enough for someone in America, then sure it's something that probably will be worth it for a retailer here.' Sneaker Impact has had contracts with Ghana in the past and said it's not currently shipping there but Hachem acknowledges there are similar concerns in the Caribbean. He said his company is working to send products to places that actually need or can use them. 'Sending a sweater to Ghana, even if it's a nice North Face, is not the right place,' Hachem said. 'Sending a size 13 shoe to Bolivia, or Honduras is the wrong market. You can send the same pair to Ukraine and it would be useful.' Bellumini appreciates how Sneaker Impact is attempting to create a circular market from a ground-up approach: 'The problem is huge and wicked at this point and there's no one solution,' Bellumini said. 'I'm not saying that the action of one person, or the action of one individual or brand or enterprise is not working. Actually, it starts from one person or one Moe, and I have never seen somebody dedicating so much money and so much time and so much effort into solving a problem.' Ashley Miznazi is a climate change reporter for the Miami Herald funded by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners.
CBS News
03-04-2025
- Business
- CBS News
Eliot Tatelman retiring as face of Jordan's Furniture brand
The president and public face of a well-known New England company is stepping aside. Jordan's Furniture announced Thursday that Eliot Tatelman "is retiring from daily operations after decades as the face of the brand." Jordan's says this is a "natural evolution in its leadership," as Tatelman's sons will be taking over. Josh and Michael Tatelman have been co-CEOs for the past five years. "Jordan's remains proudly family-run, with Josh and Michael continuing the legacy Eliot has built," the company said in a statement. "This transition ensures continued focus on innovation, customer experience, and community impact." According to a profile in the American Home Furnishings Hall of Fame, Eliot Tatelman and his brother Barry took over the family business in the 1970s when it had just five employees. They became a ubiquitous presence on TV and radio commercials, and the company went beyond just selling furniture by adding IMAX theaters, an Enchanted Village and other attractions to its stores. The brothers sold Jordan's Furniture to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate in 1999, and rewarded store employees with 50 cents for every hour that they had been with the company. They continued to run Jordan's together until Barry stepped away in 2006 to start a Broadway production company. In one of the company's more famous promotions, Jordan's gave away more than $30 million worth of free furniture in 2007 when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. Jordan's also supports numerous local charities in New England, and has helped hundreds of foster children find adoptive families . Jordan's locations can be found in Avon, Natick, and Reading, Massachusetts, as well as New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Maine.
Boston Globe
03-04-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Eliot Tatelman steps away from top job at Jordan's Furniture
For many years after taking over management of the company in 1973, Eliot shared the spotlight and the reins with his brother, Barry, appearing in a seemingly endless array of offbeat TV ads promoting the chain. Then Barry and Eliot sold the company to Berkshire Hathaway in 1999; Barry left roughly seven years later, to produce Broadway shows and pursue his passion for golf, leaving Eliot to carry the brand on his shoulders. Advertisement 'He was the smart one,' Eliot joked in an interview, as he prepared to make a similar move. Advertisement It's been a job that he has clearly relished, overseeing an eight-store empire that mixes shopping and entertainment, or what the Jordan's crew dubs 'shoppertainment': ziplines at the New Haven store, for example, or an IMAX theater at the one in Reading. During his tenure, he famously oversaw furniture giveaway promotions tied to the Red Sox; in 2007, Tatelman gave out rebates to nearly 30,000 customers who had bought items during a springtime promotional period after the Sox won the World Series that fall. But after Eliot's wife died last year, he began to rethink how he wanted to spend his time. He already had a transition plan under way: His two sons have been co-chief executives since 2019 in an unusual management structure in which they reported to their father, the company president. They'll both hold onto the co-CEO titles, but will be firmly in charge of all aspects of the business going forward. 'I've been fortunate enough to have two great kids who have really been running the day-to-day business for a long time,' Eliot said. '[Now] I can take some of my creativity and do a little bit more for others.' He said his focus on charitable work could include projects for the philanthropically minded company, such as a massive Berkshire Hathaway boss Warren Buffett has given the Tatelmans the authority to run Jordan's autonomously — a promise that was quite appealing to them when they originally inked the deal to sell the business to Berkshire when Buffett's holding company had been buying up furniture brands. Eliot said he called Buffett about a month ago to break the news to him, and ended up having a chat with the legendary investment guru for more than an hour. Advertisement Buffett also made the occasional promotional appearance, like the time in 2002 when he showed up wearing a casual short-sleeved Jordan's shirt at the opening of a six-story theater in the Natick store. Speaking at an event in Boston in 2019, Buffett mentioned that the most important trait he seeks in CEOs is whether they're in love with their companies, and he mentioned Tatelman as a prime example. 'Eliot gets excited when he's opening a new store,' Buffett said at the time. 'He's not doing it because someone in headquarters told him to.' Josh, 49, and Michael, 45, literally grew up in Jordan's Furniture, playing hide-and-seek among the beds when they were kids and joining as full-time employees more than 20 years ago. They both say they're going to honor their father's legacy, while also trying to take steps to modernize the business. When at the office, they dutifully refer to him as Eliot, not 'Dad.' 'Companies have to continue to evolve, else they die,' Josh said. 'Eliot has always pushed us to think differently, to think creatively.' Michael noted that Eliot's known for his fun-loving persona that comes across in the ads. There's another side, though, that's at least as important, if not more so: the culture that Eliot has fostered at the company while at the helm. 'He cares so much about every single employee here,' Michael said. 'That is the heart of who Jordan's is.' Advertisement The two brothers are fully aware that they will have big shoes to fill. 'Eliot has been the face of the brand for so long,' Josh said. 'Imagining what the company looks like without him is really tough. [But] we feel pretty fortunate to be involved in a company that's four generations old, over 100 years in business, still strong, and we hope we're around for another 100 years. We have the ability to do that.' Jon Chesto can be reached at
