Furniture maker’s financial cushion is worn thin

Gina Quatrine declared that her furniture factory was a “true old-fashioned European workshop” -- which seemed a bit incongruous, given that we were standing on a concrete shop floor in an industrial neighborhood of Rancho Dominguez.

Yet there was no contradicting her. All around us, Quatrine Custom Furniture‘s artisans were working with their hands, here planing the alder frame of a sofa soon to be upholstered with genuine cotton batting, there stitching a slipcover from a bolt of embroidered fabric, all in the name of creating a piece that will be sturdy and serviceable long after your mass-produced living room set has been placed out on the curb.

Quatrine, 48, serves a loyal and discriminating clientele from six stores in California, Michigan, Illinois and Texas. Every piece she sells is made to order in this factory, from a catalog of about 30 styles and hundreds of fabrics.

The firm was launched as a furniture retailer 20 years ago by Quatrine, a Southern California native, and started manufacturing its own pieces about five years later.

Quatrine Furniture is the quintessential small business. It struggles with health insurance bills for its employees, an indifferent state bureaucracy, a drop-off in customers and a remorseless credit freeze that still shows few signs of a springtime thaw.

“When you’re a small business you’re a microcosm of everything,” she told me. “There are no stimulus programs or packages for us, no [free enterprise] zones.”

At the peak of the economic cycle Quatrine was selling more than $1 million of her elegant pieces each month, from $1,200 chairs to $5,000 sofas. She crafted the basic designs herself, while giving customers almost infinite options in the fabric and style of her machine-washable slipcovers. It’s not unusual for clients to ponder their choices for weeks before finalizing an order.

The recession has cut her sales volume about in half. Her six stores are what remain from the 11 she had a few years ago. The mostly Latino workforce, which is paid $14 to $15 an hour plus insurance and 401(k), used to number about 130. Now it’s about 75.

“I’ve told everybody that our focus today is to be here next year,” says Quatrine, whose mother and stepfather, former Times business columnist Jim Flanigan, are my friends. Sales remain flat, though there’s a hopeful sign in a recent pickup of traffic in the stores, possibly a harbinger of new orders. “I believe we’ll make it -- we’ve made it this far because of who we are.”

One element of that is her preoccupation with quality. During a tour of the factory with plant manager Raul Jimenez, who has been with Quatrine since she started, we stopped to watch craftsman Oscar Jimenez assemble a spring unit for a chair cushion by yoking the coils together with waxed twine, fashioning a web of tight knots that would do a seasoned seaman proud.

But the real threat to Quatrine’s survival that no one is heeding -- not President Obama or Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger or all the “non-politicians” campaigning to “make government run more like a business” (I’m looking at you, Meg Whitman) -- is that the lubricating oil of small business, the credit system, has almost collapsed.

Firms like Quatrine’s thrive on a vast network of credit arrangements, formal and informal, binding together everyone from landlords to suppliers like textile mills in accommodating relationships of accounts receivable and accounts payable.

Traditionally, it hasn’t made sense for anyone to be especially rigid, because every participant’s cash resources can ebb and flow with the seasons and the economic cycle. Let someone create a bottleneck, and the river of commerce might run dry for all. The system allowed manufacturers like Quatrine to build up stocks of raw material and inventory so they could meet unexpected situations by bending, not breaking.

It was the way things were, and it worked. The deep recession and the crisis in bank credit put an end to it.

“The way things were doesn’t matter anymore,” Quatrine says.

Now every participant nickel-and-dimes everyone else, for fear of being stuck with the bill. In the past, Quatrine might have had credit of $60,000 to $70,000 at a mill where she placed regular orders. “We could call and say we really need this fabric, and three days later it would show up.”

Now that mill has capped Quatrine’s credit at $3,000. “That’s not even two bolts of fabric,” she says. “It’s no credit at all, basically C.O.D.” So she has to think twice about ordering inventory -- does she need it just now, or should she wait until the last minute?

The result -- she orders less and defers purchasing her raw materials. She has less flexibility to meet her customers’ requirements, and the mill gets smaller orders. Who benefits? That’s right, nobody.

It gets worse. Consider a policy recently implemented by the bank that processes Quatrine’s Visa and MasterCard charges. The bank receives the charge slips of customers who swipe their cards at her shops and is supposed to advance her the charged sums within 48 hours. Then it forwards the chits to the customers’ card issuers for collection.

Last month the bank placed a hold on $60,000 in advance deposits paid by Quatrine customers. This was her working capital, but the bank said it wouldn’t spring the money loose until she put up a cash reserve of $300,000.

Why? It decided that as a furniture manufacturer, she presented a high risk of going bust, in which case the bank would be on the hook to customers who had put their deposits for unfilled orders on plastic. Of course, the freeze only threatened to make the bank’s own fears come true.

Quatrine had to scramble. “I said, ‘That’s ludicrous. How do you expect us to get you this money?’ I said it was money I need on Monday to make my payroll, and I can’t run my business without it.”

She started offering clients a discount if they paid their deposits by cash or check. Eventually she persuaded the bank to drop the reserve requirement . . . and went looking for another bank.

It’s not as if Quatrine’s credit record is spotty.

“We haven’t bounced a check in 20 years of doing business,” she says. “But we’re paying for the sins of everybody that has just walked out. I know that it’s not that our suppliers don’t want to help us anymore, but that they’re living week to week as well.”

And as for what our bailed-out bankers are supposed to be doing for a living, i.e., lending, forget it.

Quatrine’s company doesn’t carry a dime of debt -- the $1-million loan she took out to start manufacturing was paid off years ago.

“But we can’t even get a $100,000 loan,” she says, “when we can show we have more than that in open orders waiting to be filled.”

If she could get a loan now, she would buy her own plant. “Buildings I looked at four years ago, when the price was prohibitive, are at half or one-third that price now.”

Chalk up another opportunity to prepare for expansion and cut costs, mortally wounded by the credit crunch.

Someday, Quatrine hopes, she’ll be able to get back to a normal life of designing and selling furniture.

“Am I running my company, am I designing furniture, am I in the shops? No,” she laments. “I’m writing letters every day, I’m talking to accountants and bank vice presidents, just to keep the business going. But we’re still here.”

Michael Hiltzik’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at www.latimes.com/hiltzik, and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.