What do you think? Was bankruptcy the right decision for Heather Antonelli?

The trip to India was supposed to distract Heather Antonelli from her company’s financial woes. But as she sat before a bonfire in Rajasthan in November 2004, business was the only thing on her mind.
Antonelli, the CEO of Austin-based furniture wholesaler Eminence Style, had just defaulted on a $700,000 line of credit from Bank of America. Before departing for India, she had laid off five of her 11 employees. Faced with declining sales and a huge pile of debt, she was wrestling with a tough decision:
Should she shut down her company and declare bankruptcy?
A few years earlier, such a situation would have been unthinkable. Antonelli founded Eminence Style with her mother, JoAnn, in Atlanta in 1996.
They had always self-funded the business, using profits from completed orders to finance the manufacturing of the next. Sales grew slowly and steadily, reaching $3 million in 2000. Then, in 2001 a buyer from Sears ordered $2 million worth of tables and armoires for the retailer’s Great Indoors division. It was a thrilling opportunity, but there was a hitch:
Antonelli didn’t have enough cash to pay a factory to make the furniture. For the first time, she began to shop for loans.
Landing financing was surprisingly easy—and exhilarating. In February 2002 she received a $200,000 loan from the SBA. That same week, Bank of America came through with a $700,000 line of credit. Meanwhile, she rounded up $55,000 from friends and family. “It was like Monopoly money,”
she recalls.
Eminence Style was on track to book 2002 sales of $5.5 million, with a healthy 10 percent profit.
But then the value of the dollar began to slip against the euro. A few months earlier, Antonelli had paid her factory in Hungary a one-third deposit of $210,000 to complete the Sears job, and budgeted $420,000 to pay off the balance. As the dollar tanked, the total bill increased by one-third, to $840,000. She paid in full, but eked out a profit of only $10,000.