Hometown Oneonta - The Otesgo-Delaware Dispatch: Engineering, Sustainability Guide Nikita

Engineering, Sustainability Guide Nikita

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

By JIM KEVLIN

ONEONTA

Several times, in the mid-1980s, Nikita Grigoriev applied for a U.S. Patent on “Smart Frames,” the simple basis of his and wife Joanne’s current futon business.
Rejection followed rejection.
Finally his lawyer told him: Let’s take the frame to the U.S. Patent Office and show them.
So Grigoriev took out the three bolts that hold the frame together, pocketed them, and put the wooden pallets under his arm.
His lawyer flew down to meet him in Washington D.C., and they drove to the Patent Office in Alexandria to meet the officer assigned to his case.
“I remember his face changing when he sat on it,” recalled the Richfield Springs-based entrepreneur, who was once labeled one of the “Big Three” by Futon Life magazine.
Long story short, Patent #5,722,101 was soon issued.
Grigoriev’s Nikita Indoor Outdoor opened a second store – the first is at Elm and Main, Oneonta – on Saratoga Springs’ Main Street on Tuesday, Sept. 8.
But Nikita and Joanna Grigoriev’s entrepreneurial saga goes back to 1982, shortly before the couple married.
Back home after four years in Ecuador, Mexico, Tanzania and Saudi Arabia, recently resigned from his pilot job at Emirates Airline, Nikita was trying to decide what to do next.
He’d never done much woodworking, but “the idea of designing and building my own furniture really appealed to me. I had no idea how to do it.”
But he got his hands on some Douglas fir, rented a chain saw, and soon had created a rustic bed.
At the time, he was sharing a house in Toronto with a singing group he likens to the Canadian Partridge Family. When the members saw his bed, they all wanted one.
That got him started, and he began shopping around these prototypes to furniture stores. One prospective client told him, “What we really need is something that would take a futon mattress and convert it into a bed.”
The result became U.S. Patent #4,538,308, “rather elaborate contraptions with wheels and springs and storage boxes and even self-stowing headboards,” according to the company’s history.
“They were made of solid maple and cherry and were beautifully finished. They sold for about $900 retail.”
The G-2 – for Generation II – soon followed, a simpler, lighter frame that could be folded down into a bed.
By then, Nikita and Joanne had moved to Richfield Springs and opened their first store – Simple Design – in 1987 in Oneonta.
The following year, Tennesee-based Shaffield Industries approached the Grigorievs, bought the G-2 patent, took over production and marketing the beds as EZ Convertibles.
Shaffield was soon sold to Winston Corp., which set up New West, a company that expanded so quickly – a contract with Wal-Mart caused it to ignore the speciality stores where most futons had been sold – that it was liquidated after three years.
“It was really good, yes, I was getting some nice royalties,” said Nikita, “and that ended.”
In the interim, he had kept inventing, including a two-wheel-drive bicycle that could plow through mud and sand. Royce had bought the patent, then sold it to the Chinese, who shelved it.
The silver lining in New West’s end was Grigoriev could get back into the futon business and he founded NIKEA, for Nikita Engineering and Art.
He had patented the “Smart Frame” about the time he sold the G-2 to Shaffield, so he was ready to go – again.
Harkening back to his mechanical engineering days, he figured it out on the back of a napkin on a red-eye from The Coast.
It applied the concept of the four-bar linkage to create an ergonomically correct slant when the frame is folded up; yet it flattens out completely when folded out.
“The very act of converting is not wasting energy,” Joanne said the other day while demonstrating the product at Nikita’s 7 Elm St. store.
“It’s the apex of years and years and years of responding to the market and honing the design,” she added.
In recent years, the company has evolved into Nikita Indoor Outdoor, as the couple realized the futon frames, with water-resistant cushions, are equally adaptable to garden and pool-side.
While Joanne was minding the store at one end of Otsego County that day, Nikita was manufacturing frames at the other end in a compact shop at East James and Hotel streets in Richfield Springs.
The manufacturing system evokes a marriage of Rube Goldberg – this flips up, this flips down – to spare, fool-proof efficiency.
Working alone or with a small staff, Nikita can turn out 50 frames a day, enough to supply 10 stores like the ones in Oneonta and Saratoga Springs. Next, probably Ithaca.
Nikita Grigoriev’s latest vision is again nationwide in scope. Once the reach from the Richfield Springs hub is achieved, can he create new hubs across the country?
First, perhaps, Dallas-Austin-Houston. Next, southern California. The entrepreneurial impetus knows no bounds.

Labels: 9-11-09, Nikita, The City of the Hills

posted by The Freeman's Journal @ 12:00 AM

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