Legacy on Main Street

By Dick Hughes  

DECEMBER 9, 2010 12:22 p.m. (1)

Stan and May Sedran set up shop selling furs on North Main in Greenville going on 58 years ago.   They still are there, and they are not going anywhere, not just yet anyway.

Along with the Ayers family’s leather store, Sedran Furs is the last surviving retail store of what once was the city’s lively shopping district anchored by the 200 block. Not a bad record of longevity for a couple of New Yorkers who were the first of their families to leave Manhattan for an unknown place and uncertain prospects.

“Fortunately for us, we came at the right time because the city grew and we grew with it,” says Stan. “We’ve always run a very honest business, and everybody knows that.  We are now selling to the fourth generation.”

Having built a successful business by working “our fool heads off,” they returned to where they started with a smaller business with just the two of them in the Hyatt Regency Hotel, an address they had 50 years ago.

How much longer will they keep it up?  Says May: “As long as we are able. We get dressed. We go to work. I love what I’m doing, and as long I can physically do it, I will.”

The Sedrans worry, however, that because of shoddy workmanship since fur manufacturing moved to cheap labor markets in Asia, they are having trouble getting good quality furs at a good price.

Much of what is being manufactured these days is “junk” and we “won’t handle that kind of stuff,” says Stan.

“When I can’t sell quality, that’s when I will have to leave,” says May, who learned to be a keen judge of what’s good and what’s not.

It is a promise, adds Stan, they made when they came to town. “We were not going to sell anything to Greenville that was not top quality.”  Even if it was rabbit, he says, “it was the best rabbit.”

The Sedrans arrived in Greenville in 1953, as Stan puts it “with a 2-year-old baby and not very much money at all.”

“No money!” corrects May.  She later tells of having no rye bread either.  Or, says Stan, Chinese restaurants.

After three years in the Army Air Force flying B 25s during World War II, Stan returned to New York and joined an uncle making furs.   As a youngster, he had learned to “make the furs from beginning to end.”

“I wanted to get out of the manufacturing business. We had a union shop, and the union was hurting our business so terribly that I knew that we were going to get hurt financially.

“Somebody suggested to me that there was a store here in Greenville that was losing money, and they were going to close it.  If you want to get away from your business, your uncle and all, why don’t you go down south to Greenville and take over that business?”

What they knew of South Carolina was limited to Stan’s experience in Air Force training in Columbia and May’s job as a bookkeeper for a textile company on 5th Avenue.

“Little did I know that I was going to end up where I was sending those big checks to the mills.  All I knew about it was that it was the textile center of the world,” she recalls.

With money borrowed from family, friends and New York’s Dime Savings Bank, they bought Vogue Furs.

After three years in the Vogue location, they moved to 220 North Main and in 1958 leased the Prevost Building at Main and College where they would spend the next 35 years and “become an icon, or whatever you call it, because I had the corner and no matter which direction you came from you saw Sedran Furs.”

There were difficult times, but their storage, cleaning and repair business always pulled them through.  In an approach that drew a story in Women’s Wear Daily, Stan went to surrounding towns to pick up furs for cleaning and storage at cooperating businesses.

“We were getting thousands of furs, many thousands.  Not only was that profit making but it brought me more customers. When they wanted to find something they drove over.”

Sedran Furs moved back to 220 North Main in 1993 when the owner of the corner building refused to sign a new lease.  With thousands of furs in the vault and a lot of longtime employees on the payroll, Stan and May made a wrenching decision, one that may have been a lifesaving.

Explains Stan: “The Hyatt was new and they seduced me to come here, so we decided it would just be the two us.  I don’t think I would be alive today if we hadn’t come over here because I was working myself to a frazzle.  I had triple bypass heart surgery, and my wife and I are both cancer survivors.

They considered selling. “We had people who were interested, but it didn’t work out because we didn’t feel they were qualified.  They were just going to come in and rape the city.  They just weren’t honorable.”

So the Sedrans cut back to where they were when they started, Stan, who turns 90 in January, in the back shop and May upfront.  For now, Sedran Furs is staying put.  “When we quit, it closes.”