Turkish precision a customer’s delight
Doser pours time, hard work into furniture and upholstery business
The only thing slowing down Sinan Doser is that he has to sleep. At least a little bit.
Doser plans to open a small furniture shop at the end of the month in a storefront on Pleasant Street near downtown Dartmouth.
Out back is the four-room workshop where his furniture repair and upholstery business is thriving. That wasn’t always the case, though. When he first opened his business eight years ago, he supplemented his income by delivering 300 newspapers in the overnight hours, sometimes able to grab a nap before his day job, sometimes not. He did that for two years.
“Those newspaper customers are now my upholstery customers, because I did a good job for them,” Doser said.
Moving to Nova Scotia from Turkey wasn’t part of any grand plan.
“I came just for a visit,” he said. “Next month, that will be 15 years ago.”
Doser had spent a few months living in Los Angeles making custom office furniture, and while there met another Turkish guy who was living in Canada and invited Doser to come see what it was like.
“Nice country, nice people,” was the first impression. “Then this guy said he wanted to go to Turkey on a vacation, and would I take care of his business. I said I wasn’t ready to work in a different country and my English was not good, but I said I’d try. He went to Turkey, and passed away. I ran his business, helped his family, and after six-and-a-half years I opened my own business.”
His fussiness wouldn’t let him give furniture back to customers until it was perfect, something they appreciated, and now 90 per cent of his clientele is referred by other customers.
Even when Doser was brand new to Canada, he was far from new to the furniture business.
“My last name, Doser, in Turkish means upholsterer. My dad and two uncles started working in upholstery more than 70 years ago. My two uncles stayed in that, but my dad always liked wood and he became a cabinetmaker,” said Doser, who worked in his father’s business as a boy and studied management in university. “I like this job, not for money, but it relaxes me, makes me happy and if money comes in, makes me double happy.”
The shop is filled with furniture in varying stages of repair and disrepair, along with hundreds of bolts of fabric, different thicknesses of foam and long swatches of leather and sawdust.
Just inside the entrance is a row of dining room chairs that belong to a Halifax professor and which date to the 18th century. People were shorter and much thinner then, so the chairs almost seem like miniatures.
The smell in the shop is of glue, solvents and sawdust.
Doser’s skills are broad enough that he was able to take the hydraulics off an old barber chair, and affix the unit to the bottom of a table, creating a a convertible coffee/dining room table. But most of his work involves making something old look new again.
At 53, he works seven days a week and figures he’ll be even busier when the storefront opens, which is scheduled to happen Oct. 28. He needs a showroom because a website can’t provide a tactile experience.
“My dad always told me customers want to see, to touch. And I like to show what we’re doing with furniture, but it’s not all regular furniture. In Nova Scotia, there isn’t a store like this one, or a workplace either,” he said. “For the last eight years, I’ve been accumulating antique furniture. Always I’m looking, always buying. The store will be 750 square feet — not big, but it will have probably 40, 50 pieces.”
There will be items priced as low as $25, but there will be grandfather clocks and a one-ofakind dining room set that’ll set you back a few grand.
Much of Doser’s customer base comes from the Larry Uteck Boulevard and Clayton Park neighbourhoods, but it’s expanding.
“Before, most of my customers were older people because they keep things for a long time, maybe two, three, four generations. I’ve worked on many pieces that are more than 200 years old, because Canadian families, most of them, keep family stuff.
“But the last few years, young people are really getting interested in mixing modern and antique pieces together,” he said. “I tell my customers don’t buy new, cheap furniture. If you buy second hand anywhere – Kijiji, Salvation Army – the frame is so good, and after some repair work, one-time colouring, it will last 25 or 30 years, no problem.”