Murray developed a successful wholesale/retail ceramic tile business on the West Coast.
Over the same period, the European market share of its carpet tile business has jumped by 8% to 23%.
A native of Alameda, Calif., whose family owned a tile business in the San Francisco area, Rigney could have gone into the business world, but he loved baseball.
They lived in the warehouse which held their struggling tile business and, every night before bed, they chased the rats out with a baseball bat.
So it seemed only natural that when construction workers hit the sidewalks, bloggers and many Muscovites seized on the idea that Mr. Sobyanin's wife, Irina, was in the sidewalk tile business.
It is also implicit in the inclusion of a vitrine of eccentric geometric drawings by and from the archive of Lionel Ziprin and Joanne Ziprin, who formed the mystically inclined, geometry-obsessed Qor Corporation, also a tile business, with Mr. Smith.
Created by the company's 27-year-old founder, Eli Mechlovitz, who had four semesters at the Fashion Institute of Technology and worked in his family's New York City tile business before going out on his own a year and a half ago, these tiles have a design that's all about play — or marketing.
Interface (IFSIA, 7.4) is a leader in carpet tiles, which businesses love for their flexibility.
He ran a small tile-polishing business, but evidently he did not earn enough from it.
David Johnson, who runs a tile-making business out in the depressed east of the state and is also the chairman of the Columbiana County Republican Party, thinks things are very different now.
