Strength Through Transformation

Strength doesn’t come from the traditional powerplay, a masterful strategy, one battle’s fight. Strength comes from ten thousand mistakes rectified and often expensive experiments weathered. It emerges as the quality carrying you to the end of the war.

Over the decades, every new tool, new design, or new employee slowed production initially. I never figured out how to accurately predict how much each decision would set production back, whether improving the process or adding an employee, or exploring a design idea, or relocating the shop.  Whether the change was going to be worthwhile proved to be a gamble we won often enough.  

Of course, the mixed bag outcomes of the pandemic weren’t predicted by anyone, with its increase in demand for fine furniture combined with a reduction in the available workforce.

And, unsurprisingly, our covid and post-covid related setbacks have been impossible to anticipate. This year, one of our craftsmen was out sick for 10 weeks. While he was out, another craftsman broke his leg. Yet another decided he and his wife needed to move out of the state to live near family. That’s three out of five of our producers gone or unavailable for a long time!

Before all this happened, we were already short-handed with the biggest backlog ever. Fortunately, Melanie ran a successful campaign to locate new talent and has landed us three promising new makers. We still need two more; another craftsman and a production supervisor.

With this transition and training, we are grateful to have the CNC machine in the shop. This helps us add to the team and increase production while staying on top of quality control and production flow. We think you will be seeing some interesting new design developments in the coming year and some old designs trimmed from our portfolio. All in all, we are becoming a stronger company with all this transformation and I expect a better one for our customers. We’ll do our best to keep the transition impacting your experience positively.

We appreciate your support over the years and continue to keep you in mind as we grow. All of our efforts focus on being able to work better for you. If you know of anyone who would be interested in working with us, please forward this email along to them with our thanks! More information about the open positions is available here.