By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
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GRAND RAPIDS — Gilmore Furniture Inc. could very well be the “best little furniture company you’ve never heard of” in West Michigan, as Robert Clark, information manager at the company, likes to say.

Started 27 years ago by Scott F. Gilmore with five craftsmen, Gilmore Furniture has grown into a manufacturer bursting at the seams with nearly 80 employees today. Building on strong growth — 10 to 30 percent per year before the worst of the recession — and to make room for increased capacity and more craftsmen, the company just started a construction project to expand its current 68,000-square-foot manufacturing facility by an additional 21,000 square feet. The project comes a month after completing a 4,000-square-foot addition to the production facility designed to help improve the flow of work and cut lead times. The current construction project, being built by Decker Construction Co., is scheduled to be completed by the end of October, with the company moving into expanded administrative offices and the new production space in early November.

The expansion makes way for the company to bring in-house some of the metal fabrication skills and machinery from Scott Gilmore’s other company, Grand Metal Products Co. in Norton Shores, which makes all the steel, carbon steel, stainless steel and aluminum components for the furniture maker.

“We want to learn and work on those skills every day and not have to drive to the lakeshore everyday,” Clark told MiBiz. “When customers bring in new products and new engineers, we can show them what our capabilities are here…without a 45 minute drive. And it gives us more breathing room throughout our manufacturing facility. With extremely short lead times, there’s always stuff coming through, and this will give the different work centers the ability to work on what’s coming through.”

The company plans to evaluate whether to move more of the Grand Metal Products operation to Grand Rapids depending on how quickly the new in-house capabilities take off. It plans to hire another 15 people on the manufacturing side and add a new customer service position to go along with the expansion. More capacity could also be added by rounding out the partial second shift.

Clark said the expansion was originally planned for 2008, but the company decided to put those plans on hold when the economy and the office furniture industry took a hit. Sales in 2009 maintained par with the year prior. “That’s something we’re proud of because the industry was down,” Clark said. “Through the foresight of Scott, he saw the downturn was expected and spent a lot of energy with customers to see if we could do additional work for them …and make complete finished products (versus just parts of the product). And we got out and attracted companies that we had not done work for. One of the ways we’re doing that is by offering much faster lead times than traditionally expected.

“Some of our customers have seen solid growth throughout the year, but they don’t like to (project) longer than four weeks, so we have to balance the good news with the bad news. But it was the consistent uptick and growth that gave us the guts to add on to our facility.”

Strengthening the metal capabilities helped broaden the scope of Gilmore, which had been a mostly wood-based furniture operation, thus meeting the needs of more potential customers, Clark said.

Gilmore also invested into its upholstery division, which does its own sewing. All these added capabilities — the blending of wood, metal, stone and glass materials and the addition of more in-house skills — proved successful as OEMs began outsourcing more core functions as a cost-cutting measure, he said. The company also markets its flexibility in being able to run small lot orders on up to high volume production runs.

Leaning on Gilmore’s engineering staff to find ways to match its skills with new production opportunities, Clark said the company has been able to cut costs 20 percent for some customers. Results-oriented growth has led to servicing more divisions within some customers’ companies, as well as to developing new relationships.

“We can take a project from the beginning, engineer it for a manufacturer and become a finish supplier and send the product directly to the customer,” Clark said. “That says a lot when you can send it right to (an OEM’s) customer with them not ever really touching it. That’s part of who we are. We pride ourselves in being so flexible.”

Unlike most smaller furniture suppliers in West Michigan, Gilmore is also an OEM, a fact that gives it a unique perspective when dealing with its OEM customers, Clark said. In 1998, Scott Gilmore purchased the New York-based Cumberland Furniture, a maker of high-end desk, table and lobby furniture, and moved the company to Grand Rapids. Gilmore Furniture had been a finished-goods supplier for the company before it went out of business after mismanagement and changing hands several times, Clark said. Today, the company focuses on high-quality, high-end executive office products and lounge seating, selling through a network of 30 independent sales representatives across the country.

“We want to continue to grow, but grow throughout our company,” Clark said. “We do not want to have one customer dominating our sales. In mixing our product line, we want to look at Cumberland like another customer. It’s an opportunity to diversify our client base.”

Wood furniture is an integral part of Grand Rapids’ history, but many of the companies have taken production overseas. That made way for Gilmore to acquire a cadre of skilled wood craftsmen with experience at the likes of Sligh, Baker, Hekman and Widdicomb. “We took the best of all these companies,” Clark said. Modern techniques like CNC machining coupled with the experienced hands of those craftsmen allows Gilmore to bring a value proposition to customers that other companies don’t often have, he added.