CORAL SPRINGS, Florida—Fidelity Industries Inc. in Wayne, NJ, has launched its first licensed signature collection for Jonathan Mark Designs, a new brand introduced by Jonathan Mark Rosenthal, a wallcovering designer who has worked in the wallcovering industry for 35 years. Jonathan Rosenthal

He is now in discussions with an important wholesaler of fabrics about designing a Jonathan Mark Designs textile collection and he hopes it will lead to other home products, both residential and contract. Rosenthal is an avid collector of rock music posters and this fact does not get lost in the names of his wallcovering designs like ‘Cream’ and ‘Penney Lane.’ He even plays the base guitar. His father was a fine artist and Jonathan went to Fashion Institute of Technology for textile design. Before joining Fidelity as a captive independent wallcovering consultant for 25 years, he worked for General Tire, Omnova and David & Dash in the early days of his career. 

His new collection features 150 sku’s, 12 designs in 12-16 colors. Each one is stocked by Fidelity to the tune of 1,000 yards and represents an investment of at least $500,000. The designs are geared totally to contract and feature tip printing and multiple pass printing on embossed grounds.  

His schedule has been the same for 25 years; Monday through Thursday in the Fidelity strike off and design studio in Patterson, NJ and Friday through Sunday, he spends home in Coral Springs, Florida. Rosenthal has two million air flyer miles from these trips.

MDC is the distributor of the Jonathan Mark Designs collection in the USA and Levey Industries is the distributor in Canada. Internationally, Fidelity has a secret list of distributors but the industry is so competitive, Shmulick Karp, owner of Fidelity, will not release the list. Currently, there are about 7,000 wallcovering books dedicated to Jonathan Mark Designs .The distributors buy the books and give them free to design clients. The line was introduced at Heimtextil in Frankfurt this past Jauary, the largest exhibition for the wallcovering industry today and new designs will be added for Neocon, Rosenthal says. 

“Coordinated textiles and wallcovering collections never really took off. Even today, designers want to make their own textile selections. They don’t want an exact match with fabric and wallcoverings,” says Rosenthal, a consummate designer who has designed wallcovering lines for Mayer Romanoff and Patty Madden as well as special lines for DesignTex and ArcCom. You don’t see exact matches in wallcovering and textiles in hotel rooms today. The designer wants to make the choice and not have it made for them.”

Fidelity, geared 100 percent to distributors, is one of the survivors of the wallcovering industry and also has prospered as one company after the other left the wallcovering field. For example, Omnova closed their factory several years ago. J. Josephson (Hackensack, NJ) bought what was left of it. Many competitors picked up the business left by Omnova in the process. Three years ago, Fidelity bought out Sellers & Josephson, another contract wallcovering manufacturer and this was followed up by the purchase of Surface Design Center in Carrolton, Alabama. With this latest acquisition, Fidelity can do finished screen printed and embossed samples before committing to expensive cylinders. This gives their distributors finished wallcovering samples for pitching the hotel business.

 Fidelity also produces the Command brand and its sister division is the Rigo brand, a separate business managed by Laibel Karp, Shmulick’s brother.

 “The residential wallcovering industry is dead in the USA. People are painting their home today and have been for some time,” Rosenthal points out. Contract is the wallcovering business, especially hotels; this represents 80 percent of Fidelity’s volume today, Rosenthal says. Most of the product made comes from the USA from suppliers like Fidelity, J. Josephson, LSI (Louisville, KY) and RJF in Ohio. Contract wallcoverings is a uniquely Made in USA business with the UK as the only other major country in this business, he says. Export markets for American made wallcoverings include Russia and China.