by Macy, Beth
At least two million, came the reply, and worse: Goldman Sachs needed him to pay a retainer of $465,000 by the next day.
“I said, ‘I need to go call my dad!’ ” Kincaid, then in his forties, recalled, shaking his head.
At the same time, he was dealing with a divorce, a dying brother (who was also a business partner), and the Larry Mohs of the industry, by then termed, in the Southern furniture makers’ minds, the Asian invasion. With its twelve factories and four-thousand-plus workers, Kincaid was eventually purchased in 1989 by the recliner giant La-Z-Boy, and again Steve Kincaid stayed on. This time he became senior vice president in charge of case goods and upholstery operations, making him a rare veteran of all three battles in the furniture wars—the family, the corporate conglomerates, and globalization.
The moment an import first made the hair on Kincaid’s neck stand up? One of the company’s bestselling items had long been its $220 Queen Anne dining-room chair; on a good day, the company churned out twelve hundred of them. When Kincaid noticed sales shrinking by the month, he took a closer look at Larry Moh and his importing ilk and discovered why: They were selling the same Queen Anne that Kincaid sold, only the Asian competitors sold it—even more embellished—for $50. Then $39.
“Our business started going south because we were not a value, so I went over there, and I toured their factories and I knew: We had to start importing chairs. There’s just no way we could keep doing it here and compete,” he said, even though his American plant was highly modernized, from its automated rough end to its state-of-the-art finishing operations.
For Bassett, for Stanley, and for Kincaid, the American-made chairs were the first items to fall victim to globalization. Time would soon tell what items would be flattened next under the weight of the Asian invaders—and which factories would fall.
At the Taj Mahal, the bigwigs were told to keep quiet. Spilman plotted his move like it was the invasion of Normandy. He even named the covert scheme Operation Blackhawk, a battle that would take place on the worn oak floors where Bassett Furniture had manufactured its first headboards and chests of drawers. Old Town, the original Bassett Furniture Industries factory, was closing. And true to form, Spilman wanted to make sure no one who actually worked there knew about it until he was ready to tell them.
Furniture sales had been flat throughout the industry, with 1989 sales down 1.5 percent from the previous year. The era of conspicuous consumption was coming to a close. One retail analyst said he’d found that most consumers preferred “to spend their money creating interesting lives for themselves and their children, on things like entertainment and vacations.” Closing Old Town represented a change in Bassett’s strategies, Spilman explained to his board, adding that the company was upgrading its designs to compete in a higher-priced market.
Spilman told stockholders, “Bassett has stuck to its knitting… while most furniture manufacturers have entered the consolidation frenzy and bought up other players via borrowed money.” What he didn’t mention was that he was investing in bonds for the company that paid 20 percent interest instead of investing in his own plants via upgraded machinery. What he didn’t say was that Bassett hadn’t gotten to where it was through buying bonds and using old equipment but by investing in its own industry.
In Henry County lingo, Bassett Furniture forgot who brung ’em to the dance.
“By that point, Bob was more interested in being on the boards of places like Bank of America than actually running a furniture company,” said Tom Word, a Richmond attorney who represented the Spilmans and other furniture executives related to the family. “He wasn’t going into the factories very often. He preferred to summon people to his office.”
When Old Town closed, many of its four hundred workers were shifted to the six remaining plants in the area, as was much of the machinery. Members of the public were invited to stop by and take a commemorative brick from the premier storied plant. Later, laborers who’d once worked in the factories were hired to chunk off mortar from the building’s bricks, which were sold to a British company. Which eventually shipped them to New Orleans, where they were used in the construction of townhouses.
Not one person quoted in a Roanoke Times story mentioned the real culprit behind the closing of Old Town: all the chairs and occasional tables arriving in containers at the Norfolk port, some of them trucked in willy-nilly, with chair arms in one shipment and chair legs in the next. No one quoted the middle-aged line workers who’d been going home for supper and wondering aloud, “What were all them little people doing at work today?” and “Why are they taking snapshots of everything we do?” None of the executives came right out and stated the obvious: that the sooner the “little people” learned how to craft Bassett Furniture in Asia, the sooner the local jobs would be offshored and the locals’ positions deemed redundant.
Bassett was importing 8 to 10 percent of its inventory, but visits from Virginia to Taiwan and Hong Kong were picking up. Sales had declined for three years in a row, and tempers were flaring. Reuben Scott recalled Spilman showing one of his Asian visitors how he did his pricing: he looked at a new line, priced out the parts in his head, and, within a few seconds, calculated exactly how much the company should charge for the suite and what the margin would be. He’d often humiliate his plant managers in the process, Scott said. “He’d take my [pricing] sheets, tear ’em in half, and throw ’em on the floor and go, ‘You’re crazy!’ ”
While Spilman stormed around showing everyone who was boss in Bassett, Larry Moh plotted his next move. The center of Moh’s operation was still Taiwan, but wages were rapidly rising there, and Moh had had the chessboard savvy to quietly spread the work around East Asia, with plants now in ten countries. With annual sales of $500 million, Universal was now the industry’s fourth-largest company.
The Berlin Wall had just fallen, and the red tiger would soon leap into capitalism’s fray. Over in Galax, John Bassett had left one enemy camp and had no idea he was about to be thrust into another. He was on his own now, charged with turning around a struggling and much smaller enterprise—and navigating a new minefield of family dynamics.
Thanks to the roaring success of Larry Moh and others, John Bassett had a hunch that it would not be long before he’d find himself staring down the barrel of a Communist government–backed competitor, and he’d be doing it at very close range: from inside his own factory walls.
The Dalian dresser was still two decades away, but already JBIII sensed the ground shifting beneath him, beneath the entire industry. If his little factory in the foothills stood any chance at all of surviving, everything about it would have to change.
13
Bird-Doggin’ the Backwaters
A good bird dog understands that the game has to be between the hunter and the dog. The dog doesn’t run out by herself and leave the hunter a half mile behind.
She knows exactly how you get the bird.
—JOHN BASSETT III
Decades before John Bassett made his way over the mountains to Galax, he hiked into the Henry County foothills with his Browning Sweet 16 shotgun and his English pointer, Cindy. They were quail hunting, a sport long enjoyed by Bassett men and their wealthy companions—well before Vice President Dick Cheney made a caricature of it in 2006 by shooting his hunting buddy in the face.
Cindy had always been a decent pointer. She could find and flush out quail from the heaviest of brush. But on every outing, when John shot down the birds, the dog refused to retrieve. He called in a dog-trainer friend, who brought along his beloved Llewellin setter Jill, arguably the best bird dog in the Appalachians.
John and his wife, Pat, were already among the nation’s champion skeet shooters. They’d earned top honors individually and as a hunting pair. When you’re married to a workaholic who spends most of his time thinking and talking about furniture, Pat said, it’s helpful if you pursue the same hobbies. So she became a golfer, a skeet shooter, and a hunter of quail and grouse, and by all accounts, sh
e matched her husband putt for putt and bird for bird. (“She was a little petite woman, but she’d pull out that big gun and shoot the crap outta that thing,” said their babysitter Carolyn Blue, who traveled the skeet-shooting circuit with them.)
Cindy was not so enamored of the sporting life, though, especially retrieving. So John, the trainer, and their two dogs spent Saturdays trying to hone her instincts until finally they landed on the right strategy: The dogs flushed out the birds; the men shot the birds down. But when it came time to retrieve the prey, Jill sprang forward by instinct while the men kept laid-back Cindy tethered to her leash. Hour after hour, Jill was rewarded with praise for each bird she handed them while Cindy watched it all unfold, unable to move. Before long, she grew antsy.
By late afternoon, Cindy figured out exactly what she was missing and whined desperately to be put in the game. Every time Jill bolted for another bird, Cindy yanked hard to be freed.
The first time they let her go, the men kept Jill behind, tethered to the leash. Cindy was now not only a pointer but a retriever too. It went exactly as the trainer had planned.
Jealousy was a powerful motivator, and not just for dogs. When John begged to buy Jill from the trainer, he refused to sell. After three years, John finally got her, but only because he waited till she was almost at death’s door. After nursing her back from a life-threatening case of mange and paying a whopper of a vet bill, he’d learned the power of patience and of waiting a competitor out. Though her tail tip remained forever hairless from the mange, Jill was a friend and hunting companion so devoted to him that for years she slept underneath his Ford Bronco to indicate she was always ready to hunt.
When John Bassett told me the story of Cindy and Jill, I understood perfectly what he was trying to convey: his powerful, if one-sided, vision of teamwork. He gave the orders. And because Jill trusted him for saving her life, she listened and loyally obeyed, which he then rewarded. And the cycle continued, leading to rewards for all, especially the man in charge.
John Bassett’s likeness is rendered in an almost life-size oil painting that hangs in the parlor of his sprawling stone Tudor home in Roaring Gap, North Carolina, with views that stretch from Buffalo Mountain, near Floyd, Virginia, to Winston-Salem, a hundred miles south. Perched along the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the community is so exclusive that the first time I turned onto its main thoroughfare, the road on my GPS vanished.
“And that’s just the way we like it,” John Bassett said.
The portrait, painted in 1969, shows a blond, thirty-two-year-old JBIII with his left arm around Jill and his right hand clutching his Browning. In the background, Cindy pants happily, as if waiting to spring forward and fetch him another bird. Mounted on the opposite wall of the room is a fan made of feathers from grouse Jill helped him nab, and looking out the window, you can see Jill’s headstone protruding from the well-manicured lawn between the mansion and its three-bedroom guesthouse.
The first time I visited John and Pat Bassett’s home, he spent twenty minutes telling me about Jill, a dog that had died nearly three decades before. It took one year and several visits to his factory before I understood what a mangy dog had to do with manufacturing—not to mention fighting the Chinese.
Cindy and Jill are minor characters in the trajectory of John Bassett’s career, but when you examine the scenario facing him at the Galax factory, where he landed in 1983—the worn-down workforce, the festering feud roiling yet another branch of the family tree—it all circles back to the dogs. John Bassett went after the notion of putting Vaughan-Bassett on the furniture-making map with the cunning and persistence of a hunter on the prowl.
But this time he couldn’t simply buy—or ass-chew—his way into a position of authority with the fifteen hundred Vaughan-Bassett line workers, as his forebears had done in Bassett. He had to bird-dog it—one department, one dresser, one sawdust-covered worker at a time.
But how to motivate a lackadaisical management team? And what to do with all the antiquated machinery, some of which had been purchased used—in 1954? When JBIII arrived at Vaughan-Bassett, it consisted of the Galax plant and a sister factory in Elkin, North Carolina, and together they produced a measly $28 million in annual sales with after-tax losses of $200,000. “The quality had gone to hell,” said Tom Word, a Richmond lawyer and longtime Vaughan-Bassett board member. “Some suppliers wouldn’t do business with them because they were behind on their bills. The designs weren’t very exciting, and customers were returning stuff all the time.” Quality was such a problem that several retailers had dropped Vaughan-Bassett from their showrooms.
Further complicating matters was the fact that C.W. “Buck” Higgins, Pat’s uncle and the company president, was not as ready to retire as he had hinted back when Little John was sweating his Spilman demotion to the cubicle and wanted out of Bassett. Two decades his nephew’s senior, Higgins named John plant manager instead of president and kept the top post for himself.
“I have never known a furniture man to retire well,” Pat Bassett said.
John made inroads where he could, investing $317,000 of his personal money in company stock the first year, which he used to pay off company bills. He negotiated new contracts with suppliers, eventually buying in bulk to get a discount, which explains why you can’t drive two blocks in Galax today without spotting one of the company’s myriad thirty-foot stacks of lumber. He also hoards lumber before the winter months because bad weather can halt work in the sawmills. It’s the same reason he tops off the gas tank of his bought-used 2007 Lexus every morning on his way to work—at Hess, the cheapest gas station in town. If you’re not thinking ahead, you might find yourself stranded. (“What a curious man,” said his wife of the gas-routine time-suck.)
To purchase new machinery, he loaned the company money from his personal fortune and convinced his boss to let him take out loans on behalf of the business, eventually saddling it with $18 million in debt, a move that made Higgins nervous. The Galax furniture factories had never been run with the drive—or the risk-taking—the Bassetts employed. “The family lived out of the business,” John said. “They were comfortable, but they didn’t drive the damn thing to the best it could be.”
Hope Antonoff, a longtime sales rep for Mid-Atlantic Furniture, was so frustrated with the company’s service—delayed orders, poor quality, and the old-boy mentality that resulted in her being treated like “some little girl”—that her company was planning to stop carrying the Vaughan-Bassett line. But when her boss heard that John Bassett was coming to Galax, he told her, “There’s no way we’re leaving now.”
Jere Neff had worked for Bassett Furniture from 1948 to 1969, and years after his departure from the company, he watched with interest the elbowing-out of John courtesy of Spilman and Mr. Ed. He’d seen John build the National Mount Airy plant into something the company could be proud of, only to be thanked with a humiliating homecoming in Bassett.
Neff knew that John was as detail-oriented as his uncle W.M., the one who’d transformed Bassett from a backwoods sawmilling operation into the largest maker of wood furniture in the world.
“John is more like W.M. than he was his own father,” Neff said. More important, “I knew John Bassett could sell ice to an Eskimo,” Neff said, adding that John was also willing to fly to Miami at a moment’s notice if his presence meant helping a rep close a six-figure sales deal.
After John’s humiliation during the Spilman years, Neff had a hunch that conditions were just about perfect for a forty-five-year-old family black sheep.
Neff told Antonoff, “We are hitching our wagon to that man’s star.”
Higgins may have held the reins, but he knew when to remove himself from his nephew’s path—especially where the details of the factory were concerned. John took his foremen to machinery shows, equipping them all with walkie-talkies (in the pre–cell phone era) so they could reach him if they spotted something he might want to buy.
“He ran a lathe. He ran a band sa
w,” retired sales manager Bob Merriman told me. “He wanted them to see how it ought to be done.” As the new equipment began rolling in, JBIII moved his desk from the Vaughan-Bassett offices and plunked it in the center of the machine room, between the rough end and the finishing department, something no plant manager had ever done.
People calling on the phone could barely hear him because of the roaring routers in the background, which is partly why he wears hearing aids today. Among my favorite moments of reporting this book was when he called me during my two-week residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The writer in the studio next to me was working on a memoir about his two years of solitude in the Vermont woods. He got so mad about my loud discussions with JBIII that he banged repeatedly on our thin mutual wall. Artist-colony studio silence and interviews of partially deaf furniture guys did not mix, I learned.
There was a new sheriff in town, and John wanted all fifteen hundred workers to know he was watching them. He pored over every number the bean counters produced, examined the course of each component traversing the conveyor line. The employees were so scared of him at the beginning that secretary Sheila Key agreed to be his assistant on a trial basis only. “The time he spent in the office felt totally different” from the time he spent elsewhere in the company, she recalled. “People were terrified of him.”