Home Furnishings for the Roaring Twenties!
New Orleans Item, November 6, 1921
Home Furnishings – Uptown and Downtown
Home Furnishings were an important part of the Krauss product line. While many dry goods stores at the turn of the 20th Century specialized in clothing, linens, etc., the Krauss brothers expanded out, offering a wider range of products. Rugs made perfect sense, since they were a fabric product, and the buyers were able to make the right connections in New York to get them. So, the store wasn’t satisfied with that, moving into other flooring options, like linoleum. Linoleum was common throughout the late 1800s. Invented in 1855, good linoleum was a practical and tough floor covering. The product is organic. Modern-day plastic flooring is often called “linoleum,” but that’s more a connection made by older folks who remember walking on the real thing.
Many of the same manufacturers who made rugs also made big blankets. After all, the setup of the production line isn’t all that different. The usually buying method used by Krauss was to negotiate with a factory for product. They’d go looking for one thing, identify other items out there at good wholesale prices, and bring them back to New Orleans. Sometimes they were marked as a special lot and sold as such. Other times that first purchase turned out to be a good thing for all, and the products entered the regular store inventory.
1911 Expansion
Krauss in 1921 looked a bit different than the big building at 1201 Canal Street now. The brothers expanded the original building back about fifty feet in 1911. That addition went up five stories. All of the expansions after that added on at five stories, goign to six in the back later. There were no escalators in 1921, so shoppers got to the upper floors via elevators.
Newspaper ads were the main way the store had to communicate with shoppers, even after radios became widespread.
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