Daniel Strohl on Mar 22nd, 2019
After closing its doors late last week, the LeBaron Bonney Company, a longtime supplier of reproduction interior and upholstery kits for Ford and GM collector cars, has filed for bankruptcy.
According to Josh Burnett of Kitaeff and Associates, the law firm representing the company, on Tuesday LeBaron Bonney filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, “which means that the company’s assets will be assigned to a trustee and the assets will be sold” to satisfy any outstanding debts.
Burnett did not elaborate on what led up to the company’s bankruptcy. Calls to the company went straight to voice mail and were not returned.
When brothers Lee and Jack Atherton founded LeBaron Bonney in 1938, the furniture company scions did so to provide rental bicycles to tourists from their summer home on Cape Cod. They later tried a number of direct-mail business models selling historic maps, replica sailing vessels, and handmade goods before they settled on the old-car upholstery reproduction business in 1959.
According to company lore, Lee Atherton had bought a Ford Model A to restore with his son Barry but found nobody local willing to reupholster the interior or restore the convertible top. The trimmers at his family’s furniture business took a look, decided they could duplicate the interior and top, and their results went on to win praise at old-car shows. Atherton decided this was the business opportunity he’d been looking for and started packaging interior restoration kits that he could sell worldwide using the mail-order business model he and his brother had tried decades earlier.
By the mid-1960s, with business booming thanks to ads placed in Hemmings Motor News, Atherton moved the company from Haverhill, Massachusetts, into a 14,000-square-foot building in Amesbury, then later expanded into a 29,000-square-foot building formerly occupied by Biddle and Smart also in Amesbury. A carriage-building concern that dated back to the 1860s, Biddle and Smart’s business switched to supplying coachbuilt bodies to automobile manufacturers in the early 1900s. According to Michael Lamm, writing in Special Interest Autos, the company reached its zenith in the 1920s and ended up becoming the de facto coachbuilder for Hudson for much of that decade. In a move to save costs, however, Hudson switched to other coachbuilders and, by 1931, Biddle and Smart had gone out of business.
While the company expanded with the purchases of Hampton Coach, ABC Auto Interiors, and EZ Boy Auto Interiors — all intended to expand the company’s reach to owners and restorers of cars beyond its core Ford Model A business — the company also passed out of the Atherton family’s hands, a move that some enthusiasts noted as detrimental to the company’s customer service in recent years. Still, Scott Holbrook, owner and president of the company, had made plans for expanding the company into an existing building in Wilton, Maine, as late as last summer.
According to the bankruptcy filing, LeBaron Bonney had assets of $500,000 to $1 million against liabilities in the same range.
Burnett said the bankruptcy process “can take a few months, or significantly longer.” A meeting for the company’s creditors is scheduled for April 25 in Boston.
