Empire buys Luna Carpet, but jingles will ring on

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Updated: March 8, 2012 8:13AM

Empire Carpet’s owner has bought rival Luna Carpet, but you won’t be able to get either jingle out of your head just yet.

Both the “588-2300 EMPIRE” and “773-202 LUNA” will keep jingling away on radio and TV because both companies will continue operating separately, even after Empire owner Empire Today LLC bought Luna on Jan. 31.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Marlo Michalek, spokeswoman for Northlake-based Empire, said consumers should see no changes in either company.

Both Empire and Luna will be managed separately and no changes in their brands or organizational structures are anticipated, Michalek said. No layoffs are expected, either, she said.

No one from Luna Carpet returned a telephone call seeking information.

Empire was founded in 1959 as a family business, and has expanded to 45 metro areas nationwide. It participates in TV shows such as “Curb Appeal” and “Designed to Sell” on HGTV, according to the company website.

Elmer Lynn Hauldren, an Evanston resident who created the Empire Carpet Man and the Empire jingle in 1977, died last year at age 89. Hauldren recalled in a 2006 Sun-Times interview that Empire owner Seymour Cohen hired him and kept him on contract.

The Bellwood-based Luna opened retail stores five years ago in Addison, Lake Zurich, Naperville and Wheeling, adding to its brick-and-mortar presence at a showcase gallery in Schaumburg, according to an Aug. 20, 2007 Sun-Times article. Luna employed 150 and reported $35 million in yearly revenues in 2007, the Sun-Times reported.

Luna President Morrie DeZara described the showcase gallery at the time as the “Nordstrom of carpet stores” with greeters, buttoned-down salespeople, and a clean, polished environment.

Luna got its start when Salamon DeZara arrived in America from Istanbul, Turkey, in 1956, and started selling slip covers for couches.

The elder DeZara died in 2005 at age 81.

When sons Morrie and Steve took over the business in 1990, Luna’s clientele was almost exclusively Latino, and the company focused on selling carpet and slip covers. By 2007, the Latino market accounted for 9 percent of Luna’s expanded customer base.

The elder DeZara learned the carpet trade by working for a wholesaler at an open-air bazaar in Istanbul. He came to Chicago and lived with his sister speaking only Spanish and Turkish. He worked at a bookbinding factory and a plastic furniture slipcover company, but he quit the book bindery in 1958, and started his own slipcover company.

He named it Luna, inspired by the site of the moon over the water in his native Turkey.

Operating out of his home and office in a two-bedroom apartment on the West Side, he went door-to-door in Latino neighborhoods selling slipcovers. Later he rented a storefront on Armitage Avenue on the city’s Northwest Side and started advertising on then-Spanish station WCIU.

He started selling carpets in the 1960s, after he bought a building at 3531 W. Fullerton Ave. The company kept growing, and Salamon was recognized in the community as “Senor Luna.”

“We’d be at a restaurant, and the waiter or busboy would say, ‘I know you. You’re the guy on TV,’” Morrie recalled of his father. “It was kind of fun.”