THIS CAN'T BE THE PLACE. THAT was my first thought.
We'd already driven 30-odd miles west from Grand Rapids -- down bumpy back roads, past cornfields still stubbly with last season's cuttings, apparently heading straight for the shores of Lake Michigan itself. Now Dick Keener was pulling his red Oldsmobile into a tiny parking lot in front of a small, drab, shedlike building. The image didn't quite fit. Keener's new company was planning to make high-design, very expensive office chairs, the kind a glitzy New York City interior designer might order for a new corporate conference room. Somehow I expected to see a high-design, very expensive -- yes, even a little glitzy -- installation.
My mistake. I must have spent too much time among the splashy start-ups of Silicon Valley and Route 128, where the first order of business is to rent a building with manicured lawns and smoked-glass doors. In the office-furniture industry, I soon realized, you can work out of a barn, so long as it's within reach of a truck and telephone line. And the less you spend on high-priced land and fancy buildings, the more you can spend where it counts -- on design, tooling, and marketing. This was the place, all right: Keener pointed to the muddy field out back, where the outlines of a 12,500-square-foot factory were staked in the dirt. In just a few months, he said cheerily, a preengineered steel plant would be erected there, and Keener-Blodee Inc. would be ready for production.
Production! Getting there, admittedly, was taking longer than Keener had expected. In June 1986, at age 57, he had taken early retirement, ending a 31-year career with American Seating Co., a large manufacturer based in Grand Rapids. By January of '87 he had grown tired of "Europe and golf," and had begun talking with longtime friend Leif Blodee (pronounced Blo-DAY), a Danish-born architect and furniture designer, about the company they had often imagined starting. Maybe now was the time. Both men's children were grown. Old age was still a decade or more away. They knew -- and were known in -- an industry.
"Eight to 10 million in 8 to 10 years," thought Keener, envisioning a pleasantly symmetrical sales goal. Then sell the company and retire.
Over the next several months, the partners' plans began to take shape.
WHEN AN INSURANCE AGENT OPENS a new office, he's likely to drop by an office-furniture dealer's showroom and pick out desks and chairs himself. When an insurance company opens a new office, it hires an interior designer (or an architectural-design firm) and gives the designer a contract for the whole shebang. The designer, in turn, develops a "spec" -- instructions to the corporate purchasing department about the types of furnishings needed to execute their design. The folks in purchasing then place orders through a network of manufacturers, reps, and dealers who specialize in commercial and institutional furnishings. The "contract furniture" business, as it's known, is the industry in which Keener and Blodee had spent their careers -- and in which they proposed to start their new company.
Not that they intended to take on the giants. Big manufacturers such as Steelcase, Herman Miller, and Haworth -- all of them headquartered in western Michigan -- dominate much of the contract market with endless lines of desks, chairs, and the ubiquitous slotted-panel, "open-plan systems" used to turn unbroken office space into "componentized" cubicles. But there are plenty of niche players in the industry, simple because a designer doesn't impress that special client by specifying, say, yet another Steelcase conference-room chair. Let's get something a little nicer looking, she might think. Let's get something . . . in wood! Warm, natural, elegant in its lines, yet well crafted and highly functional.
Keener and Blodee were counting on just such a train of thought. For them, high-design wood-and-upholstered chairs made a natural product line. Blodee already had some drawings on his worktable, even a couple of hand-built samples. Tooling and equipment costs would be lower than with steel or plastic, and gross margins would be relatively high.
Nor did this particular niche seem over-crowded. A few modest-size U.S. manufacturers -- such as Westin-Nielsen and The Gunlocke Co. (recently acquired by Chicago Pacific) -- were doing pretty well; so was Rudd International, a Washington, D.C.-- based company that imports stylish Scandinavian furniture. But the dropping dollar was already beginning to hurt the imports. Besides, Keener knew from his days at American Seating that designers were always looking for something new and different.
Different, he figured, is exactly what Keener-Blodee would give them. Unlike most domestic manufacturers, the company would work exclusively in laminated wood. Laminates are stronger than comparable thicknesses of solid wood, and thus permit long, lightweight, curved members -- a "European look" effectively captured by Blodee's design. Finely detailed joinery, traditionally associated with European craftsmen, would reinforce the continental image; so too would Keener-Blodee's marketing materials, right down to the accent marks gracing the two founders' names on the company logo. But the prices, turnaround times, and reliability would be all-American.
"Everything's designed to give the idea we have a European heritage," says Dick Keener. "Designers love the European style; they just can't get it. We give them the look, but we're made in the USA."
