Posters Provide Framework for Success

Who says you can't go home again?

Not the three Zeiden siblings, who recently opened one of their popular Z Gallerie stores in Sherman Oaks Fashion Square.

Joseph, Michael and Carole Zeiden Malfatti grew up in Van Nuys, in a neighborhood recently renamed Valley Glen. Their widowed mother, Shirley, still lives there. And it was there that the boys, barely out of Grant High School, decided to follow the example of a friend and start their own business selling posters.

"We used to frame everything in our parents' garage," recalled Mike Zeiden, now chief financial officer of what has grown since 1979 into one of the nation's top 100 furniture retailers.

In fact, the Zeiden family garage functioned as a mini-warehouse for the new company, which opened its first store, devoted entirely to posters, on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks.

Mike was 19, his brother, 24, when they opened the first Z Gallerie. Mike quit his job delivering and doing other chores for a local pharmacy, but Joe, now president of the firm, decided he couldn't afford to leave the lighting store where he worked.

"He kept his job in case we couldn't make rent," Mike recalled of their first shop. The brothers got a book out of the library to learn how to put up drywall in the store, which was about 900 square feet.

The way their family and friends remember it, Mike said, they were all behind the fledgling enterprise, which opened its 37th store last week in Las Vegas. But in fact, he said, no one was sure the inexperienced young retailers would make it. Their late father owned and operated bars in the Valley, but the boys had no formal business training.

"At the beginning, who knew it was going to end up the way it is today?" said Mike Zeiden, whose family-owned corporation, based in Gardena, expects sales this year in excess of $90 million.

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Within a few months, the first Z Gallerie began to thrive. Poster art was hot in 1979, and the brothers ran the stores with the passionate attention that only people who own a business bring to it. They made it a point to remember what every customer bought so they could serve him or her better the next time. The business quickly expanded to seven poster galleries in the Los Angeles area.