duralee
Combining lasting designs with emerging innovative talent, Duralee is one of the interior design industry’s most exciting fabric brands. The company began, aptly enough, when the country’s pulse quickened. Returning from World War II, Lenny Silberman faced changing times. The world was inching in a different direction, and by 1947 it was already evident to Silberman, as he walked the streets of New York, that the future “was what you made it,” he asserts. Never subtle, Silberman answered an ad in The New York Times promising “a HUGE opportunity” as a textile shipping clerk for $35 a week, landed the job, and went to night school to expand his industry knowledge and learn the fine art of selling.
Together with his two partners - Sig Rosenberger and Marshall Kutz - and seven other hands-on employees, Silberman launched Duralee in 1952 from an office smaller than most modern-day walk-in closets.