Allen’s first import trip, made at the request of his father, was to Canton Fair in Guangzhou, China’s oldest and largest trade fair. Soon, he was jetting frequently between New York, Hong Kong, and China. “We didn’t even have a warehouse. We’d bring everything straight to the store. And we’d be selling so fast because the prices got better.”
Eventually, Allen launched his own business, Best Home Decorators, Inc. in 2012. He hired staff, including three of his children and two cousins. For years, he imported the kind of furnishings that tantalize magpie-eyed travelers on long, empty highways: Chippendale desks, rococo beds, old-world tapestries, chandeliers, and marble lions. And then one day in 2018, following the advice of his Internet-savvy son, Allen made a sudden, company-wide announcement. Best Home Decorators would be abandoning its name; in fact, they’d be changing a lot of things. From now on, they’d be known as Throne Kingdom, sellers of lifesize thrones.
“We’re not paying a retail wholesaler anymore,” Allen explains. “We became a manufacturer, and we can offer better prices.” His employees reached out to existing customers, pitching thrones at competitive rates. According to Sol, a lot of them were buying. “The home furniture market—especially this area [of Brooklyn]—had been so saturated,” he says. “Before, we’d work so hard, showing people around for two or three hours, and if we didn’t sell them on the spot, they’d never come back. I saw the thrones and thought, Hey, we could be selling these. We wouldn’t be competing with anybody. I knew it would be harder to build our brand, but eventually, we’d be working less to make more.”
In 2023, Throne Kingdom generated roughly $2.4 million in revenue, a 10% increase on the previous year. They now deliver to every state in America and beyond—to Australia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia. Their biggest spike in sales occurred during the pandemic, when event rental companies, bolstered by government grants, began buying up their first “fleets” of thrones. These supplied a growing market of customers self-styling their life’s major celebrations—weddings, baby showers, graduations, quinceañeras—for audiences viewing at a distance or driving by. “We bring everybody’s dream into fruition, ” Allen says. “Most people think we’re crazy. Even if you’re selling toothpicks, they’ll say you’re crazy! So you don’t listen to nobody. You just go about your business.”
Scammers and Saviors
The custom gray suit Allen is wearing, a gift from his son, is lined with e-comm images of throne chairs. They repeat across the silk like a luxury brand logo-mark, riffing on codes of legitimacy and desire. Like many salespeople, Allen is prone to optimistic hyperbole, but at the center of it all is something gleaming, maybe even a little true. “Everybody wants to be a king,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It doesn’t matter where they live, they want to own a throne chair.”
Allen’s favorite anecdotes involve his customers eclipsing the ordinary limits of longing (essentially, going nuts for thrones). Take this one: When delivering the glitzy King Samuel to the home of a journalist in Brooklyn, it became apparent that the seat wouldn’t fit through the front door. “He told me, ‘I don’t like my doorway anyway,’” Allen recalls. “Then he took a crowbar, and started ripping his door off. He tore the entire front door and frame away, and we carried the chair straight in…. You see how much people want a throne chair?”
