Bostonians like to brag about their celebrities with big personalities — David Ortiz, Mindy Kaling, Mark Wahlberg, to name a few. And then there’s Eliot Tatelman of Jordan’s Furniture.
While not well known outside New England, Mr. Tatelman has been a fixture for years on local television, hawking mattresses and sofas in humorous, relatively low-budget ads that made him one of the region’s instantly recognizable personalities, an avuncular pitchman with a ponytail guaranteeing “underprices.”
Now, Mr. Tatelman is stepping away from his job, relinquishing his crown as New England’s king of couches.
He announced this week that he was retiring as president of Jordan’s and that his sons, Michael and Josh, were taking over as the fourth generation of the family to run the furniture chain. They already serve as co-chief executives of the company, which is based in Dedham, Mass., and has 1,200 employees and eight stores in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Tatelman, 79, said he began thinking about retiring when his wife of 56 years, June, died in May. It made him think about “how fast and precious life is,” he said. He said he realized “it’s time to step back.”
The announcement set off sadness and nostalgia in New England, a region known for fiercely guarding its traditions.
“You think about New England and it’s hard not to think about Jordan’s Furniture and to include it in all things you think about growing up,” said Douglas Quintal, a senior executive-in-residence in the department of marketing communication at Emerson College.
Mr. Quintal, who was raised in Peabody, Mass., has made his own pilgrimages to Jordan’s over the years, to buy a bedroom set, a sofa and a love seat.
“It’s sad to see the changing of the guard,” he said.
The ads that helped make Mr. Tatelman famous often featured him and his younger brother, Barry, who also ran Jordan’s until he left in 2006 to produce shows on Broadway. They were self-deprecating and resolutely local, tying the brand to New England institutions like the Red Sox.
In one from the early 2000s, the brothers are shown dressed in Red Sox uniforms, lying in Jordan’s beds on the field at Fenway Park. Barry reaches up and lazily catches a fly ball and Eliot delivers the closer: “You know what the secret to this game is?” he asks. “A good night’s sleep.”
In another, Eliot and Barry sleep soundly on a Jordan’s mattress in the audience of a Boston rock club, as Entrain, a band from Martha’s Vineyard, plays loud funk music to a crowd of dancing fans. The tagline? “With the right mattress, you can sleep through anything.”
Beyond the ads, the Tatelmans turned the gargantuan stores themselves into attractions, like amusement parks with rides and entertainment — a movie theater with moving seats called the Motion Odyssey Movie, IMAX theaters, ropes courses and a reincarnation of a Christmas display called the Enchanted Village that was featured for years at the Jordan Marsh department store in downtown Boston.
The guiding philosophy was that buying a dresser should be fun.
“When kids are crying because it’s time to leave a furniture store, you know you’ve accomplished something,” Eliot Tatelman said in 2015, when he and Barry were inducted into the American Home Furnishings Hall of Fame, an organization based in High Point, N.C.
Eliot Tatelman also applied his showman’s instincts to Red Sox-themed promotions, including one in 2007 in which he promised that anyone who bought furniture during a roughly monthlong period would get that furniture free if the team won the World Series.
He made good on the promise when the Sox swept the Colorado Rockies to win the Series later that year. Mr. Tatelman said he paid out about $35 million to roughly 25,000 customers. (Insurance helped cover the losses.)
“That’s kind of the marketing genius behind what they did, in my opinion,” Mr. Quintal said of the Tatelman brothers. “They always find a way to keep themselves ingrained in the local culture.”
Jordan’s also built good will through its charitable efforts, like giving away bicycles to 1,000 children at local Boys & Girls Clubs.
Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company controlled by the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett, bought Jordan’s in 1999, but the Tatelman family still runs its day-to-day operations.
Even though he has retired, Eliot Tatelman said that he still plans to appear in Jordan’s ads “with the concept of eventually fading me out.”
It’s something he clearly enjoys.
“It’s fun being recognized,” he said. “It’s fun being a semi-celebrity, even though I don’t have any talent. I’m a businessman and that’s what I do.”
