On a basic level, Nancy Zafrani, the second-in-command at Midtown-based Oz Moving & Storage, is responsible for making sure boxes travel safely from point A to point B.
But because those packages can contain an entire life’s worth of cherished antiques, books and wedding presents, items that are often on the go because of a birth or death, the job can be more like that of a therapist.
“This is a very personal industry, because you are handling people’s homes, and they can get very stressed about it,” she said. “When clients tell me that I helped to make things stress-free, it’s really the best thing I can hear.”
Zafrani has plenty of chances to soothe. Orchestrating about 18,000 moves a year to places like Spain, Switzerland and Seattle, but mostly between floors of New York apartment buildings, she’s handled almost a half-billion relocations in her three-decade-long career, she says.
If Oz were a roll of bubble wrap, Zafrani might be its cardboard tube, there from the beginning and at the company’s heart.
While a 17-year-old student, Zafrani worked part-time at a sporting goods store in Manhattan that was “terrible” but hard to leave. Her mother, who worked for a board of education in Westchester, and her father, a bus mechanic, had imparted a strong work ethic. “I’m not really a quitter and hate to leave people in the lurch” Zafrani said.
But she threw in the towel, and the next day a friend called to tell her about a telemarketing job at a moving company, which she got. Her boss there, and a mentor, was Avi Oz, who asked her to join him in 1993 when he founded Oz Moving. “When one door closes, another opens,” said Zafrani, whose initial tasks included cold-calling companies she knew were moving based on newspaper stories. Thirty-one years and no detours later, Zafari is Oz’s general manager today.
The company began with a mission that was compelling, she said: clean up an industry tainted by bad actors. Indeed, it was not unknown for some movers to hold belongings hostage until customers forked over an extra couple hundred bucks.
In his crusade, Oz added his firm’s business license number to the side of his trucks and urged clients to call the Department of Transportation to check on his record, something customers did not usually do when plucking random names from the phonebook, Zafrani explained. “It was really like the Wild West before,” she said. “We put all our cards on the table, and it worked.”
But the pandemic caused a bumpy ride for the company, which like others has seen its fortunes rise and fall with the real estate market. Initially flooded with calls as New Yorkers scrambled to relocate to Florida or upstate, Oz later saw demand flatten as home sales stalled. “When the market is slow, we can feel it,” Zafrani said.
But the 180-employee company, which reeled in about $30 million in revenue last year, is motoring ahead. In December it snapped up area firm Movage Moving + Storage, a specialist in international relocations, to allow Oz to expand into Europe. Another recent investment was in AI-powered cameras for its fleet of 40 trucks, which, unusually, are serviced by two in-house mechanics. The cameras track eye movements, and if drivers’ lids droop, the cameras bark commands like “Look at the road!” and “Wake up!”
With the role of counselor comes insight, which in Zafrani’s case means realizing how obsessed people can be about their stuff: Some customers have stashed boxes in warehouses in Yonkers and New Jersey and not touched it for 20 years. “I try not to be a pack rat myself,” she said. Still, she can relate to some clients; she bounced around a lot in her 20s, “always moving on to the next better or bigger apartment,” she said, before finally settling down.
What may differentiate Zafrani the most is being the rare woman executive in a heavily male industry, though she downplays the breakthrough. “I have always had the support and respect of the people I have worked with, so it has never felt like a struggle,” she said. Besides, she added, women can seem like a natural fit for the business. “Women have always been the ones to pack up the boxes before moves,” she said, “so it’s not a far reach.”
C. J. Hughes , 2024-03-25 11:03:04
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