It took Sam Prizant 45 years to build his carpeting and flooring company into a regional power. It took Mark Scioscia and Rob Lang, who bought Prizant's Carpet in mid-2006 with no experience in the flooring business, 18 months to kill it, the saddened former owner said yesterday.

"I built up a real strong business," in the black annually with revenues between $25 million and $30 million, said Mr. Prizant, the 78-year-old founder.

"Everything was running smooth. It took these guys about two years to make a complete disaster of things." In his voice are traces of bitterness, betrayal and disbelief that the two new owners, the two principals of Sewickley's Sweetwater Investors Inc., would close all 10 of the company's locations in a matter of weeks, leaving dozens of employees jobless at Christmas.

"They owed a lot of money to a lot of different people, including me," Mr. Prizant said.

Neither Mr. Scioscia nor Mr. Lang could be reached on their cell phones yesterday, and Mr. Scioscia could not be reached at his home number. An old phone listing for Sweetwater Investors also has been disconnected.

The Post-Gazette first reported the closures of the outlets last week, the same week a Richmond, Va., manufacturer submitted a court claim for $54,000 worth of merchandise. Meanwhile, a former customer, Charles Buntack, had sued the company for $3,440 in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court, claiming inferior service; in the same court, Mr. Prizant himself had requested that Sweetwater be forced to vacate several locations because of unpaid rent.

"I did business with Prizant in the past. I was really pleased with them," said Mr. Buntack. "But that was before the new management took over. ... I knew they were going out of business the way they were responding" to his many calls and queries.

The Penn Hills-based company was a southwestern Pennsylvania business fixture, a household name thanks to its newspaper and TV ads. It competed locally with the likes of Roth Carpet and Molyneaux Tile and Carpet, as well as the big home improvement chains such as Home Depot and Lowe's.

Left in the lurch are an unknown number of customers who have the customary one-third deposit on flooring from Prizant's. Whatever the number is, "there's way more than we thought," said Patrick Molyneaux, one of the four owners of Molyneaux Tile and Carpet. "The phone has literally been ringing off the hook."

Mr. Molyneaux said if a Prizant's customer can prove he or she paid a deposit but didn't receive carpeting, Molyneaux will install the flooring for the balance due to Prizant's, minus the deposit already made.

He declined an invitation to guess what might have gone wrong over the last year-and-a-half, only hinting that "in the era of the big-box store, if you are not obsessive-compulsive about customer satisfaction, you will not survive." Mr. Prizant, on the other hand, ruefully accepted the invitation, speculating that the new owners spent too much on renovations and marketing, dispatched too many longtime employees upon taking over, and perhaps drained too much liquidity out of the company.

Reviewing the sale in his head, he said he now sees clues that his business partners were either naive, inattentive or both.

Mr. Prizant said the duo, who were matched with the carpeting company by a business broker from Sewickley, didn't audit the company's inventory prior to the purchase to verify that Prizant's had in its possession the flooring that it claimed.

"To me, that's pretty basic."

They also declined his offer to act as a consultant during the transitional months.

At the time, Mr. Lang said he and Mr. Scioscia had been looking to invest in a company that trafficked in actual, physical products that couldn't be outsourced: "You still have to walk on a carpet."

Interviews with former customers and vendors suggest that Prizant's began having problems soon after Sweetwater took over. One of Sweetwater's early announcements was that it would unveil a new advertising campaign, a corporate "rebranding" courtesy of the Strip District's Think Inc.

But that relationship quickly soured, mainly because Sweetwater wasn't paying the bills.

"We were happy to sever that relationship quite a while ago," said Todd Patterson, one of Think Inc.'s founding partners.

Mr. Lang's business pedigree was shaped by time spent at two area consulting firms, Blue Hammock and Telescope Consulting. Mr. Scioscia helped to open a glass products fabricator.

The company Web site, meanwhile, has not been updated to mention the closings. Several angry customers have said they intend to retain lawyers and complain to the Pennsylvania attorney general's office.