Douglas Carton paid his way through college selling sweaters out of the trunk of his car but gave it up after graduation to become an accountant - a job he hated.
"I kept thinking I need to get a bigger trunk," he said. "I made pretty good money selling sweaters."
Instead, he leased a storefront in downtown Bel Air and opened C-Mart, a discount clothing store that has become one of Harford County's long-standing retail institutions, with a cult-like following in the Baltimore region.
Now Carton is applying the formula that made C-Mart so popular - cheap prices, brand-name blowouts, cluttered stores and hand-scrawled ads - to a furniture store.
The C-Mart Discount Home Store is slated to open tomorrow in an old Kmart building at Joppatowne Plaza, in an economically depressed corner of Harford County. "Furniture had always done well at C-Mart," Carton said. "We just never had the space to keep too much of it."
Just as at the old store, not a lot of money is being spent on the particulars.
Cash register stands cost about $2,000, so C-Mart Vice President Keith Silberg bought $200 worth of wood and built his own. Store signs are written with felt markers on white poster board.
The building is nondescript, the furniture set out on the floor with no fancy displays or shelves.
"I think they have a definite formula that works for them," said Mark Mueller, a principal at commercial real estate brokerage KLNB Inc. in Towson, who specializes in retail investment sales.
"You go in and it's a no-frills appearance, not a sexy decor, and that goes with the image they're trying to portray, that you're getting a bargain."
When Carton opened C-Mart in an old 5-and-10 store in 1975, the crowds came instantly because there were few places at the time to buy such brand names as Calvin Klein on a middle-class budget.
"Discount shopping was a pretty new concept then," said Silberg, who is Carton's nephew. "There were high-end department stores but no place where you could buy nice clothes on a budget."
Carton was raised in a family of jobbers - people who buy large amounts of goods and sell them to dealers. His great-grandparents plied the trade in Russia. His grandparents and parents, who later immigrated to America, bought merchandise wholesale and sold it to storekeepers in Baltimore.
"It's in our blood," said Carton, 55.
Carton came up with the C-Mart name when asked what to put on his business license.
