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How America’s Most Iconic Furniture Brands Are Built Through Design Legacy and Leadership · The iDesign Lab Podcast

0:00
Voice Over: This is iDesign Lab, a podcast where creativity and curiosity meet style and design.
0:06
Voice Over: Curator of interiors, furnishings, and lifestyles, hosted by Tiffany Woolley, an interior designer and a style enthusiast, along with her serial entrepreneur husband Scott.
0:16
Voice Over: iDesign Lab is your ultimate design podcast, where we explore the rich and vibrant world of design and its constant evolution in style and trends.
0:26
Voice Over: Today on the iDesign Lab, we're joined by Alex Schuford III, president and CEO of Century Furniture and the Rock House Farm Family of Brands, including legendary names like Hickory Chair, Hancock and Moore, and Maitland Smith.
0:39
Voice Over: A third-generation design leader, Alex has spent his life shaping how craftsmanship, innovation, and timeless design come together in the luxury furniture world.
0:48
Voice Over: Please welcome Alex Schuford.
0:51
Tiffany Woolley: Welcome to the iDesign Lab Podcast.
0:53
Tiffany Woolley: Today we are luckily to be in studio with Alex Schuffert of Rock House Farm Family Brands.
1:02
Alex Shuford III: Yeah.
1:02
Alex Shuford III: Rockhouse Family Brands, sure.
1:04
Alex Shuford III: CEO.
1:05
Tiffany Woolley: CEO.
1:06
Tiffany Woolley: So welcome not only to South Florida, but to the iDesign Lab podcast.
1:10
Tiffany Woolley: You have such a lengthy story that we hope to get into today about the family business of designing a life around a beautiful business of furniture.
1:24
Scott Woolley: I think the first thing I want to bring up or talk about is your third generation.
1:27
Scott Woolley: Your grandfather started the company.
1:30
Scott Woolley: And your uncle?
1:32
Alex Shuford III: My uncle was uh president after my grandfather, and uh my dad worked with my uncle, was uh ran all the upholstery operations, and and then for a short period of time we had managers not the family running it.
1:44
Alex Shuford III: Really?
1:45
Alex Shuford III: And then family stepped back in and has run it for the last year.
1:48
Scott Woolley: But three drench generations, that's three generations.
1:50
Scott Woolley: That's a wonderful thing to talk about.
1:52
Tiffany Woolley: So American, I believe, too.
1:54
Tiffany Woolley: Iconic.
1:55
Alex Shuford III: When did your grandfather start it?
1:57
Alex Shuford III: 1947.
1:58
Alex Shuford III: We were a textile family before that, so we were yarn and twine from the turn of the century, 1800s, and then slowly got into fabric weaving.
2:09
Alex Shuford III: Uh and in the 30s, my grandfather bought a fabric company called Bowdy's Weavers during the tough times.
2:17
Alex Shuford III: The family legend is he either won it in a poker game or bought it for a dollar and assumed the debt, right?
2:24
Alex Shuford III: So whichever one you prefer.
2:26
Alex Shuford III: Uh but he turned the fabric company around, was doing fairly well, and and then once the the war effort broke out, all the factories were turned over to the war effort.
2:35
Alex Shuford III: Then post-World War II, obviously a lot of GIs were coming back, it was a little bit of a boom time.
2:40
Alex Shuford III: People were starting families and households, and there wasn't enough furniture production, and there were a lot of shortages of materials.
2:46
Alex Shuford III: So if you were trying to get into furniture production or already making furniture, you were struggling to find metal springs and fabric, things of that nature.
2:55
Alex Shuford III: He happened to own a fabric company, so he had access to that material.
2:59
Alex Shuford III: And he was a connector, he was one of these great people that could uh walk into a room and twenty minutes later know everybody.
3:06
Alex Shuford III: And so we knew a guy in the government who had access to metal springs.
3:10
Alex Shuford III: And uh so he put two and two together, went around town, and talked to a lot of the small furniture companies about producing specific designs just for him.
3:20
Alex Shuford III: So we literally started as a white label buyer of other people's capacity.
3:26
Alex Shuford III: Um famously Buddy Cheryl's dad actually made furniture for my granddad for a while.
3:31
Alex Shuford III: That's right.
3:32
Alex Shuford III: And then after about six months, he realized that almost anybody could get into the upholstery business.
3:38
Alex Shuford III: Right.
3:38
Alex Shuford III: He started his own facility, but also then began construction on our case goods factory.
3:43
Scott Woolley: Um somewhere in the late 40s, early fifties.
3:50
Alex Shuford III: Uh we still own the first facility they ever had.
3:54
Alex Shuford III: Uh we actually produce furniture in it right now.
3:56
Alex Shuford III: All in North Carolina.
3:58
Alex Shuford III: Still all in North Carolina.
3:59
Scott Woolley: So it's started in North Carolina and started and stayed.
4:02
Alex Shuford III: Yeah.
4:02
Alex Shuford III: And the fabric company still does wonderfully, uh sells fabric to most of the major players in the industry.
4:08
Alex Shuford III: They're now actually a 100% employee-owned company.
4:12
Alex Shuford III: We sold it to the employees.
4:13
Alex Shuford III: What a beautiful story.
4:15
Alex Shuford III: It's a good it's a good little uh American story.
4:18
Alex Shuford III: And third generation messes it up, so maybe I'm that guy.
4:22
Alex Shuford III: Uh so far we've been able to navigate through at least the obvious and major hurdles, like you know, global pandemic, housing collapse, things like that.
4:31
Alex Shuford III: So we'll we'll see.
4:32
Alex Shuford III: Maybe this next one will catch us.
4:34
Alex Shuford III: But uh so far I've got enough smart people around me to keep me from my my worst decisions.
4:40
Scott Woolley: Aaron Ross Powell So growing up, you grew up in the furniture business.
4:43
Scott Woolley: But as a kid or as a teenager, were your aspirations and goals to Were not.
4:48
Alex Shuford III: So my first summer job, uh so I grew up on a horse farm.
4:52
Alex Shuford III: Um my mom raised us thoroughbred horses, and so as kids we were mucking stalls and feeding horses and baling hay, and and she always would remind us that if we failed in life there was a pitchfork with our name on it.
5:05
Alex Shuford III: We could come back and muck stalls.
5:07
Alex Shuford III: Um but my first real summer job was working in the furniture facilities.
5:13
Alex Shuford III: Uh I worked in distribution and then I worked one summer in the case goods factory gluing corner blocks onto the underside of drawers, and and then when I got into college, you know, my dad, to his credit, was you know, told me do something other than furniture.
5:26
Alex Shuford III: Really?
5:26
Alex Shuford III: And uh, you know, and so I sort of ran from it as as for a while, and then I went to college out in California, and then post-college ended up staying out there.
5:38
Alex Shuford III: Um and as gravity is, I ended up buying a little fabric and decorating store in Northern California outside of San Francisco from two ladies that were running a little operation selling fabric by the yard and doing window treatments and top of the bed.
5:54
Alex Shuford III: And um and I sort of got my teeth into it and thought that I was better than I was, so I opened up a second one and then we bought a third one and we opened up a fourth one.
6:04
Tiffany Woolley: And so the entrepreneurial spirit was there as well.
6:06
Alex Shuford III: And it was the category I knew at least something about, or at least I thought I did in my twenties.
6:11
Alex Shuford III: You know, it later in life you realize you knew nothing about it, and thank God for a couple of really wonderful ladies that kept me from messing up more than I would have otherwise.
6:19
Alex Shuford III: But but that early experience in retail and in design really helped sort of set me up to come back into the quote unquote family business.
6:29
Alex Shuford III: Um and in about the 2001 time frame, I came back into the town.
6:35
Scott Woolley: So did they pursue and go after you, or did you have Coles wanting to go back to North Carolina?
6:41
Alex Shuford III: Yeah, no, I I uh I was living in Northern California, so no one ever wants to leave Northern California.
6:46
Alex Shuford III: But you can't afford to live there, so then you have to make practical decisions.
6:49
Alex Shuford III: Um and I had just gotten married um and uh and we wanted to buy a house and start a family, and so there was a temptation to uh to kind of go somewhere where it was more uh sort of affordable to live.
7:02
Alex Shuford III: Um and we had as a family company, the the the corporate entity, Sentry, had bought a company called Expressions Furniture.
7:09
Alex Shuford III: And Expressions was a custom upholstery operation that had franchised stores.
7:15
Alex Shuford III: Um but we didn't know anything about running retail stores because we were a manufacturer.
7:19
Alex Shuford III: But I was out in Northern California running retail stores and so my dad asked me if I would go take a look at it and just give him an assessment of how this operation was running.
7:29
Alex Shuford III: And so as a favor, I said, sure, I'll you know, I'll find something.
7:33
Scott Woolley: So you came with a different perspective.
7:34
Alex Shuford III: That's right.
7:34
Alex Shuford III: I had a little bit more of that.
7:36
Alex Shuford III: What does it look like to run a seven-day-a-week business and to deal with the consumer?
7:40
Alex Shuford III: And then so after a couple of months of of sort of checking out a couple of stores, he and I had a long conversation and he asked me if I would come help run the expressions operation.
7:50
Alex Shuford III: And I sort of did it as a part-time thing with my retail stores on the other side.
7:54
Alex Shuford III: Because everybody forgets the original dot com bust was in that 2000 time frame where pets.com and you know all the original companies went, you know, went under.
8:05
Alex Shuford III: And I was in Northern California running high-end luxury furniture and decorating services.
8:10
Alex Shuford III: So I had some time on my hands because things were a little slow.
8:13
Alex Shuford III: Uh and after I got more involved, it's you know, businesses are sticky.
8:18
Alex Shuford III: When you find I'm a fix-it guy, I like to fix things.
8:21
Alex Shuford III: And so once I got involved with Expressions, it was plenty of stuff that needed to be.
8:24
Alex Shuford III: So how many stores did Expressions have?
8:26
Alex Shuford III: At that point in time, they were just under forty, most of them franchise.
8:30
Tiffany Woolley: That's a lot.
8:31
Alex Shuford III: It was a lot.
8:31
Alex Shuford III: It was a big operation.
8:32
Alex Shuford III: Small stores, they were all, you know, I call it 8,000 to 12,000 square foot stores.
8:38
Tiffany Woolley: Brick and mortar.
8:39
Alex Shuford III: Yeah, brick and mortar, and and run by people franchising is a funny thing.
8:42
Alex Shuford III: You know, when somebody buys a franchise, they expect it to be easy and successful.
8:46
Alex Shuford III: Um and the the problem is it was also furniture, so it also had the element of being difficult and low margin.
8:53
Alex Shuford III: And so that combination uh required a lot of coaching, a lot of you know, sort of management attention to make sure the franchisees were successful.
9:03
Alex Shuford III: Some of them were were wonderful business people and ran great operations, and other ones struggled more and took more hand holding.
9:10
Alex Shuford III: And and you know, we also owned a factory that supported them, so that uh eventually fell underneath my uh umbrella, and I had to make sure the factory was full, which was you know something I think a lot of people in the industry don't think about when they think about this this you know, this industry is we really uh uh our success is determined by how full we keep our factories.
9:30
Alex Shuford III: You know, and so you do that with fashion, you do that with relationship, you you do that with newness, you do that with pricing and promotion and discount, you whatever tool you can pull out of your toolkit, the deal is run your people 40 hours a week.
9:43
Alex Shuford III: Because if they're getting a full 40-hour work week, then you're probably making money, they're probably staying with you, you're probably having some success.
9:50
Alex Shuford III: But if you start underfilling your factory, now you've got a reputational problem locally, you've got all kinds of headaches financially, and and so my job was keep that factory full.
10:01
Tiffany Woolley: And busy.
10:02
Alex Shuford III: That's right.
10:02
Alex Shuford III: But I only had those stores to do it with.
10:04
Alex Shuford III: So I was trying to find my way out of that.
10:07
Scott Woolley: When you were in college, did what was your good degree?
10:09
Scott Woolley: Was it marketing or because you have an interesting background in terms of jumping into retail Yeah and understanding retail is Absolutely?
10:18
Alex Shuford III: It was so I'm an English major.
10:20
Alex Shuford III: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
10:20
Alex Shuford III: An English major creative writing as my concentration.
10:25
Alex Shuford III: Um and people always kind of raise their eyebrow at that, and I tell them, well, at at its base, you know, it was a liberal arts education.
10:31
Alex Shuford III: Right.
10:32
Alex Shuford III: So it was critical thinking, analysis, uh comparative analysis.
10:36
Tiffany Woolley: What a great base.
10:37
Alex Shuford III: But also communication, the ability to get an idea across, to be able to verbalize that and say it eloquently so that you can influence others to kind of move forward with you.
10:48
Alex Shuford III: And um, I'm a big fan of people that um have a broad concept of education, again, the ability to critically think, but have learned to communicate.
11:00
Alex Shuford III: And if you think about where we are heading, and we may delve into this with AI coming on board as quickly as it is, your hard science degree may not be as valuable as that person next to you who used to make fun of who has a softer degree in something that's more aligned with communications.
11:18
Alex Shuford III: But but yeah, I was um I took a lot of business classes uh also uh sort of uh alongside of that English major.
11:26
Alex Shuford III: And then I was just interested in the way businesses operated.
11:31
Alex Shuford III: I I did a lot of sort of uh self-education, uh reading uh and listening and being around business people.
11:38
Alex Shuford III: But there's no better education in business than to go work retail.
11:43
Alex Shuford III: Like that's where the rubber meets the road in almost every business in America.
11:48
Alex Shuford III: And and retail, you know, we always think it's selling a physical item, but it's not.
11:52
Alex Shuford III: You could be selling a service, you know, you could be selling a concept, you could be selling marketing, but that ability to interact with the buyer, the customer, to get them to feel good about what's happening, to trust you as the seller, and then to consummate the transaction.
12:07
Alex Shuford III: Because a lot of people fail at that level, right?
12:09
Alex Shuford III: Don't forget to ask for the order.
12:10
Alex Shuford III: Right.
12:11
Alex Shuford III: You spend an hour getting them to like you, and then they walk out the door and you forgot to ask them for the order.
12:15
Tiffany Woolley: Oh, he was a nice guy.
12:16
Alex Shuford III: Yeah, that was wonderful.
12:16
Alex Shuford III: I had a nice pleasant afternoon.
12:18
Alex Shuford III: Now I'm gonna go somewhere else somewhere else and buy the product.
12:20
Alex Shuford III: But but that was a big part of my early education was getting into retail and then having the success and failure of my little operation out in California be my pers personal success or failure.
12:32
Alex Shuford III: Like I was a sole proprietor.
12:34
Alex Shuford III: So the checks I wrote were out of my checking account, right?
12:37
Alex Shuford III: If we were short money that week to pay a supplier, it was m my issue.
12:41
Alex Shuford III: Yeah.
12:41
Alex Shuford III: Um and uh You were eating less that week.
12:44
Alex Shuford III: I was eating less, that's right.
12:45
Alex Shuford III: I was sleeping on the conference room table.
12:47
Scott Woolley: I was figuring it out.
12:48
Scott Woolley: So I I opened a grocery store at 21 years old, 32,000 square feet, grew it to 42 stores in 11 years.
12:56
Scott Woolley: My first two years, I basically I would say slept in the back room.
13:01
Scott Woolley: I would take like scarlet towel towel boxes, put them all together.
13:05
Scott Woolley: Put them together, and that's what I slept on most nights because I would finish work at 2 30 in the morning and the store was open back at seven and so I slept two hours in the back room.
13:14
Alex Shuford III: It is such a I I had a very similar story where I sold the my friend and I had a house in the Bay Area.
13:21
Alex Shuford III: We sold it, and I kept saying, Well, I'll find an apartment, I'll find an apartment.
13:24
Alex Shuford III: And because I was working 80 hours a week, I never got around to finding an apartment.
13:28
Alex Shuford III: I lived for two months in my office.
13:31
Scott Woolley: I actually I actually had a a shower installed in the back room with just like a wire with a screen and at six o'clock before anyone can't got into the store, I'd take my shower.
13:43
Alex Shuford III: That's it.
13:43
Alex Shuford III: I would wake up and go to the health club every morning at like 4 35, take a shower, I'd be back in the office.
13:48
Alex Shuford III: And you do, and it's that grit.
13:50
Alex Shuford III: It is an underappreciated element in business success.
13:55
Alex Shuford III: You a lot of people read about, well, you fail and you learn from your failures, but but they don't, I think, feel what that means, which is you're willing to do anything and everything to make sure that this entity you have stays alive.
14:09
Alex Shuford III: And it's it's like raising a child.
14:12
Alex Shuford III: It is, it's your first baby.
14:13
Alex Shuford III: It's your first baby, right?
14:14
Alex Shuford III: It really is.
14:15
Alex Shuford III: Um yeah, so that for me was was sort of seminal.
14:19
Alex Shuford III: And I'm uh when I interview people, it uh it's usually something I'm looking for.
14:23
Alex Shuford III: Have you ever worked in retail?
14:24
Alex Shuford III: Because there's an empathy that comes with that, both for the customer but also for your fellow business person.
14:30
Alex Shuford III: Um you know, to realize how hard it is to deal at the point of contact with the person that's buying the good.
14:37
Alex Shuford III: And and if you have that empathy, then it changes your whole perspective in relationships and how you develop trust.
14:44
Alex Shuford III: So 42, that's no small feat.
14:47
Alex Shuford III: That's in 11 years.
14:49
Scott Woolley: Yeah, 42 grocery stores, six liquor stores, and four pharmacies.
14:52
Scott Woolley: Oh wow.
14:53
Scott Woolley: Well, you need to put liquor stores because you were in the grocery business.
14:55
Scott Woolley: My most frustrating thing was that we had pharmacies in four stores, but I was not allowed to ever go into or walk in the pharmacy because I didn't have a pharmacy license.
15:06
Scott Woolley: And then I would have arguments with some of the pharmacists that I had that I hired to run the pharmacist, right?
15:12
Tiffany Woolley: That's where trust comes in.
15:16
Alex Shuford III: You're not allowed in there.
15:17
Alex Shuford III: I love it.
15:18
Speaker 5: That's kind of crazy.
15:20
Alex Shuford III: But you were allowed in the liquor store, right?
15:23
Scott Woolley: Yeah.
15:23
Scott Woolley: So along the way in your early years, was did you have any mentors or people that kind of guided you, you looked up to, you got advice from?
15:32
Alex Shuford III: Well, I mean, primarily, obviously, my father was a big one, a big influence.
15:36
Alex Shuford III: Um and I knew my grandfather, but uh he wasn't active mentoring me.
15:42
Alex Shuford III: Uh he was more of this sort of idea of success.
15:44
Alex Shuford III: Okay.
15:45
Alex Shuford III: But my dad was someone I would reach out to and uh and help me along the way quite a bit.
15:50
Alex Shuford III: And then and then in retail early in California, um I had there was a an operation uh in one of the areas where I had opened my last store, uh, and he was a really successful little decorating business there, and um and for for a long time I competed with him poorly.
16:08
Alex Shuford III: He continued to beat me.
16:10
Alex Shuford III: And he's a classic story.
16:11
Alex Shuford III: I finally invited him out to lunch.
16:13
Alex Shuford III: I said, I you know, like if I can't beat you, I'm gonna at least talk to you about why.
16:17
Alex Shuford III: And uh and I won't name his name, but I took him out to lunch and we had a nice long lunch, and at the end of the lunch I looked at him and I said, Finally, he said, How do you do it?
16:24
Alex Shuford III: Like I, you know, I do X and you do X minus Y, and you I do Y and you do Z.
16:30
Alex Shuford III: And I I just can't I can't win.
16:32
Alex Shuford III: And I was just down the street from him, and he looked at me and he goes, So you rent?
16:37
Alex Shuford III: And I went, Yes, sir.
16:39
Alex Shuford III: He goes, Yeah.
16:40
Alex Shuford III: You're probably never gonna beat me.
16:42
Alex Shuford III: I own.
16:43
Alex Shuford III: And it was lots of little tidbits like that over time where people had given me just really good, simple advice.
16:50
Alex Shuford III: Yeah.
16:50
Alex Shuford III: The the first two ladies that I bought the first store from were fabulous mentors.
16:55
Alex Shuford III: You know, because I was 24.
16:58
Alex Shuford III: I was a kid.
16:59
Tiffany Woolley: I know, and how did you even get to that?
17:02
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, it was crazy.
17:03
Tiffany Woolley: I was 24.
17:04
Alex Shuford III: I was doing um high net worth advising, you know, where they hire young kids recently college educated that can speak well, and they send them out there to try to build up a book of business.
17:14
Alex Shuford III: And I uh was focusing on kind of the one area I knew, which was textiles and furniture, et cetera.
17:19
Alex Shuford III: And I wandered into this little store owned by the a couple of ladies out in California, and they were delightful.
17:25
Alex Shuford III: Uh and after a long conversation at the end of it, I left them a card and said, If you're interested.
17:30
Alex Shuford III: If you ever want to sell it, call me.
17:32
Alex Shuford III: Did something spark an interest when you saw the operation?
17:35
Alex Shuford III: It was a it was a fabulous location, um, but it was they had they were struggling with uh with brand identity and a few elements that I thought, gosh, I could fix these things.
17:48
Alex Shuford III: Um, and you know, just where they were, what they were getting 5,000 cars a day past it, but they had named it you know in a way that everybody thought was an Italian restaurant.
17:58
Alex Shuford III: So I was like, because it took me a long time to find it, and so I said, gosh, I can fix this.
18:02
Alex Shuford III: And they laughed at me when I when I left them my cart and walked out, and then a couple weeks later they called me and said, Are you serious?
18:09
Alex Shuford III: What we might want to sell it.
18:10
Alex Shuford III: And you know, and post-buying it from them, they really they were you know they were in their mid to late fifties.
18:16
Alex Shuford III: I was in my twenties.
18:17
Alex Shuford III: They taught me a lot about how to deal with the customer, about just the the sort of finer points of design and decadently.
18:24
Alex Shuford III: They stay on with you for a period.
18:25
Alex Shuford III: They stayed on with you to the to the very end.
18:28
Alex Shuford III: Um, you know, and uh Sheila and Linda, if you're out there listening, they love this a shout-out for you.
18:34
Alex Shuford III: But they um wonderful ladies, and they were patient with me, they were stern when they needed to be, you know, even though I was the quote unquote boss, they were they were effectively raising me as an empathetic uh executive.
18:47
Alex Shuford III: And then when I got back into the family business, there were any number of people.
18:51
Alex Shuford III: Um the guy that brought me back into the business himself, uh a gentleman named Bob Merisich, who you know famously went on later to to run the Las Vegas Market Center, and their company ended up buying you know about 60-70 percent of the real estate in High Point, where the big show is.
19:07
Alex Shuford III: But he was the president of Century at the time, and he was an incredibly charismatic leader.
19:12
Alex Shuford III: Um and from everybody I've worked for, I you know you always try to take away the elements that you think are are really valuable.
19:20
Alex Shuford III: And from from Bob, that ability to sort of command a room, that charisma, to to get people on board quickly with a concept and get them moving as a group towards the execution of it, you know, was a was kind of a superpower he had, and something that again, I'm people are often surprised by this.
19:41
Alex Shuford III: I'm introverted by nature.
19:42
Alex Shuford III: If you give me a personality test, I'm an introvert.
19:45
Alex Shuford III: Um they say, wow, you don't come across as an introvert, even though I'm very extroverted.
19:49
Alex Shuford III: But it's all about at the end of the day, does that wear you out and do you need to recharge or whether does that charge you up?
19:54
Alex Shuford III: But the skill of learning how to r understand a group of people, feel their energy, and then move them together as a group towards a goal, that's a that's a learned skill.
20:06
Alex Shuford III: You can do that.
20:07
Alex Shuford III: It's like I tell my kids, like public speaking is just a learned skill.
20:10
Alex Shuford III: It is.
20:10
Alex Shuford III: It may make you nervous, but you do it you know enough times in a row, you will get good at it.
20:15
Speaker 5: Right.
20:15
Alex Shuford III: Um, and I I learned a lot from him.
20:18
Alex Shuford III: Uh there was a great upholstery person.
20:20
Alex Shuford III: I've actually just hired him back as a uh consultant at the company matter of fact named Bob Choppa, who was a wonderful merchant, but even more so was fabulous in a factory.
20:31
Alex Shuford III: And that's a whole different skill than being in front of a customer.
20:34
Alex Shuford III: You know, people in a factory see things differently.
20:37
Alex Shuford III: They they come with a little bit more um uh I guess skepticism uh when they you know when you when you approach them as an executive.
20:46
Alex Shuford III: You've got to show them.
20:47
Alex Shuford III: You've got to, you know, you have to show you.
20:48
Alex Shuford III: And if you're an executive, they they're you know that that sort of skepticism of, well, uh you're just trying to make my day difficult, you're just trying to you know you're trying to make, you know.
21:00
Alex Shuford III: What and his ability to get them aligned, you know, uh, you know, an employee that is actually producing the furniture was something that was a unique trait.
21:10
Alex Shuford III: He was, you know, a uh uh baseball player, he connected with them on sports, he you know, he could communicate with them in plain um language to get across a concept, not demean them, not assume you know, not assume that their opinion didn't matter, and create real, again, esprit de corps, you know.
21:29
Alex Shuford III: And so each one of those along the way was an element that was important.
21:33
Alex Shuford III: And frankly, a lot of my competitors have been mentors over the years, some active where I literally meet with them and and they share and I share, and some who I seldom met with but watched what they do from a distance.
21:47
Alex Shuford III: Buddy Cheryl was an unbelievable competitor for many, many years.
21:52
Alex Shuford III: And I probably only met Buddy Cheryl two or three times in my life, but I watched what he did, studied what he did, learned a lot from seeing how he ran his company.
22:01
Alex Shuford III: And um you know, I think again, if you're if you're a student of your industry and a student of business, um you're always looking for what somebody something uh somebody does that's successful and something that somebody does that isn't.
22:14
Alex Shuford III: Um the maybe biggest lesson I ever learned was from a company that went out of business twice.
22:22
Speaker 5: Literally went bankrupt twice.
22:24
Alex Shuford III: So it was a company called Furniture Brands International.
22:26
Alex Shuford III: They Henry Don, Drexel Heritage, Thomasville, Broyhill.
22:30
Alex Shuford III: They were they were world beaters.
22:31
Alex Shuford III: All the big brands.
22:33
Alex Shuford III: They were, when we when I was in the industry early, they were the example of the successful conglomerate.
22:40
Alex Shuford III: Um they were driven out of business.
22:42
Alex Shuford III: Were they family owned or all the brands had originally been family brands, but they had gotten uh organized into a public company.
22:51
Alex Shuford III: Okay.
22:51
Alex Shuford III: So this company went out of business and then it got reassembled uh as a company called Heritage Home Group, all the same brands, bought out of bankruptcy by a private equity firm and and sort of relabeled, and then went bankrupt again.
23:04
Alex Shuford III: You know, and so you say, wow, what what kind of lesson can there's a lot of lessons in watching a company that goes bankrupt and what they did and what you should maybe think about not doing.
23:13
Alex Shuford III: And we are, in many ways today, a bit of a multi-brand conglomerate.
23:18
Alex Shuford III: And they were an example of us as a public company.
23:21
Alex Shuford III: And you say, Well, what mistakes did they make that led them to that?
23:24
Alex Shuford III: So you know, and there are a lot of them.
23:25
Alex Shuford III: One is they probably undervalued relationship, they they undervalued individual brand leadership and the autonomy of each brand to find its own way stylistically and and from a uh a marketing and distribution standpoint.
23:39
Alex Shuford III: Yep, and and we take those uh lessons and w they are bedrock for us.
23:45
Alex Shuford III: Like all of our brands have independent leadership and they have their own autonomy for direction setting.
23:53
Alex Shuford III: Uh what they want to do from a product standpoint, they do.
23:56
Alex Shuford III: Like I'm aware, but I don't tell Highland House that it can or can't do something.
24:00
Alex Shuford III: Right.
24:00
Alex Shuford III: I don't tell Hickory Chair what next new dining room table to work on from a marketing standpoint, from a distribution standpoint.
24:06
Alex Shuford III: Like we we work really hard to make sure we don't think in a homogenized way.
24:11
Alex Shuford III: And you know, I think that's really important.
24:13
Scott Woolley: Yeah.
24:14
Alex Shuford III: And so people look at us all the time and say, why do you let that brand that you own compete with this other brand that you own?
24:18
Alex Shuford III: And I say, that's what makes them sharp.
24:20
Alex Shuford III: I was going to say makes them sharp.
24:21
Alex Shuford III: They sharpen themselves against each other all day long.
24:24
Tiffany Woolley: So twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago, when you came back into the family fold, was it under I mean, that other company you mentioned?
24:33
Tiffany Woolley: Expressions.
24:34
Tiffany Woolley: Expressions.
24:35
Tiffany Woolley: But was that just century and expressions at the time?
24:38
Tiffany Woolley: And all of this newness and all these other brands are under your guidance and leadership.
24:45
Alex Shuford III: So at the time, um the family company at that moment in time was Valdi's Weavers, the fabric company.
24:50
Alex Shuford III: Um we had just spun off um our yarn and duct tape company.
24:56
Alex Shuford III: So there's a branch of the company that uh at the time was one of the country's biggest makers of adhesive tape.
25:02
Alex Shuford III: That's and so my cousins run that business and own that business today.
25:06
Alex Shuford III: It's called SureTape.
25:07
Alex Shuford III: And y'all would know them as duct tape.
25:08
Alex Shuford III: Tape, yes.
25:09
Alex Shuford III: So that's that's one branch of the family.
25:11
Alex Shuford III: They do quite well with the adhesive tape.
25:13
Alex Shuford III: Who knew?
25:13
Alex Shuford III: Duct tape?
25:14
Alex Shuford III: Oh, yeah.
25:16
Alex Shuford III: But at the time, so we had just spun them off, so the company was was Valdies Weaver's Sentry Furniture and Expressions Furniture.
25:22
Alex Shuford III: Um and so when I came back, I was working for Expressions, and then after a period of a few years, I kind of got moved back into the Century fold uh and I was running some upholstery offerings for Century.
25:34
Alex Shuford III: Um and then kind of middle of the 2000s, um, you know, as families do, you know, that different branches of the family wanted different outcomes uh with their investment.
25:46
Alex Shuford III: And my immediate branch of the family was pretty dedicated to the furniture business.
25:51
Alex Shuford III: And so my father and my sisters and I bought the furniture brand Century from the rest of the family.
25:57
Alex Shuford III: And the rest of the family, a couple of branches, kept the textile company along with real estate and some other assets, and and we took home the furniture entity in a pile of debt.
26:09
Alex Shuford III: So I'm very comfortable in the debt world, um, but I like to be debt-free because those early lessons in the motive, it's a motive.
26:18
Alex Shuford III: That's right.
26:19
Alex Shuford III: Guess what?
26:19
Alex Shuford III: You great news is you own a wonderful old furniture brand that makes a small profit margin.
26:24
Alex Shuford III: Bad news is you have a pile of debt with Bank of America figured out.
26:27
Alex Shuford III: Um so over the next couple of years, that was 2013, uh, we paid down all that debt, you know, worked really hard to get back to basically debt-free.
26:37
Alex Shuford III: And a couple of years after we bought Sentry, a great competitor and another mentor, we talked about mentors earlier, but another mentor of uh to me, Jack Glasheen and his company, uh, which was Hancock and Moore, Jessica Charles, um, and Cabot Wren um uh approached us.
26:56
Alex Shuford III: We actually had had a conversation about trying to it's another one of those.
27:00
Alex Shuford III: I invited him to have coffee one morning because I'd always been competing with him.
27:04
Alex Shuford III: And at the end of this cup of coffee, I was a precocious young executive.
27:08
Alex Shuford III: And I said, you know, Mr.
27:09
Alex Shuford III: Glassine, it's been such a delight, you know, chatting with you this morning.
27:12
Alex Shuford III: I've learned so much.
27:12
Alex Shuford III: And if and if you ever want to sell Hancock and Moore, call me.
27:15
Alex Shuford III: Yeah, and and he sort of again kind of laughed at me, and then a few months later reached back out uh, you know, uh, and and we had a conversation and and ended up buying Hancock and Moore, and again, borrowing a bunch of money to do it.
27:30
Alex Shuford III: And then we spent the next couple of years paying the debt back down and got back down to sort of debt-free again, and and we had a really nice operation between Century and Hancock and Jessica.
27:39
Alex Shuford III: And at about that point in time, um this company I just mentioned, uh Heritage Home Group, which was the the second entity after furniture brands, was trying to sell assets because they were on the verge of bankruptcy again, and one of the assets they were trying to sell was Hickory Chair.
27:57
Alex Shuford III: Jeez.
27:57
Alex Shuford III: And so they reached out to us, and we had an old history with Hickory Chair.
28:00
Tiffany Woolley: I was just gonna say, how did you know that that would be something you'd be interested in?
28:04
Alex Shuford III: Well, I had when we bought Sentry from the rest of the family, I at that point in time I had made a short list of other brands that if we ever got the opportunity, we should be interested in.
28:12
Alex Shuford III: That was on the list.
28:13
Alex Shuford III: And Hickory Chair was on the list.
28:14
Alex Shuford III: Well, what put that on the list?
28:16
Alex Shuford III: So it was what did you like about it?
28:18
Alex Shuford III: Yeah, it was one of the oldest operating furniture companies in the United States, founded in 1911.
28:23
Alex Shuford III: Um when it was founded, there was a Schuford family member on the founding charter.
28:28
Alex Shuford III: We were an original owner in the company, but shortly thereafter the the Schuford family member had sold out their shares.
28:34
Alex Shuford III: Right.
28:35
Alex Shuford III: In the 30s, during the Depression, um a private equity firm out of New York had bought a group of furniture companies down in North Carolina, and it was the original Hickory Manufacturing, which became Hickory White, which is now a division of Cheryl, but also Hickory Chair at the time.
28:53
Alex Shuford III: And so they came down, they were gonna liquidate the assets.
28:56
Alex Shuford III: They were, you know, the classic robber barons.
28:59
Alex Shuford III: They bought it for nothing.
29:00
Alex Shuford III: They were coming to town, they were gonna liquidate all the factories and sell everything off.
29:04
Alex Shuford III: And my grandfather and his brother and another person in town caught wind of the fact that these New York sort of private equity people were coming to town on the train to to look at the assets they just bought and figure out how to dissolve it.
29:18
Tiffany Woolley: Dismantle it, yeah.
29:19
Alex Shuford III: And so my my grandfather and his brother and this other gentleman met them at the train station, and when they stepped off the train, introduced themselves and said, We will pay you two hundred thousand dollars more than you just paid for these companies if you get right back on the train and head back to New York.
29:34
Alex Shuford III: The deal is done right here on this train station.
29:37
Alex Shuford III: Right.
29:37
Alex Shuford III: And the guy said, quickest, easiest two hundred thousand we've ever made, did the deal, got back on the train, and went right back up to New York.
29:45
Alex Shuford III: And so f for a moment in time, we owned Hickory Chair again in the 30s.
29:50
Alex Shuford III: That's but they went back to the parlor at my grandfather's house and divvied up the companies, and the other gentleman took Hickory Chair.
29:58
Alex Shuford III: You know, so we had these sort of multiple.
29:59
Alex Shuford III: Like connections with Hickory Chair over time.
30:02
Alex Shuford III: And Hickory Chair had always been one of our best competitors.
30:06
Alex Shuford III: And I mean competitor is a competitor.
30:08
Alex Shuford III: But competition's good.
30:10
Alex Shuford III: Yeah, somebody we respected.
30:12
Alex Shuford III: They ran a great company.
30:14
Alex Shuford III: At the time before we bought them, Jay Reardon, who was a legend in the business, had really rebuilt Hickory Chair back to glory.
30:24
Alex Shuford III: And what we saw was one of the marquee brands and an important employer, excuse me, in Hickory, North Carolina, that was at risk of losing all the good work they'd done because they were just caught up in a company that had lost their way.
30:39
Alex Shuford III: And so we agreed, you know, in principle to buy it.
30:42
Alex Shuford III: We structured a deal.
30:43
Alex Shuford III: Everything was going along swimmingly.
30:46
Alex Shuford III: And literally, the Heritage Home people caught us up in the middle of the summer, and we were about 30 days away from closing the deal.
30:52
Alex Shuford III: And they said, Bad news, we want to still do our deal with you to sell you Hickory Chair, but things are going so poorly everywhere else that we're going to have to file bankruptcy before we can complete the deal.
31:01
Alex Shuford III: And we said, No, just let us just let us peel it out before you do it.
31:05
Alex Shuford III: Just let us complete our deal.
31:06
Alex Shuford III: And they said, I'm sorry, it's just we're draining too much money.
31:09
Alex Shuford III: We're going to file bankruptcy on Monday, like four days later.
31:12
Alex Shuford III: And so then we had to become the stalking horse in the auction process.
31:16
Alex Shuford III: And we got a whole new education.
31:18
Alex Shuford III: Drug out for months and months, and you know, and it was the whole bankruptcy auction in court and the whole deal.
31:25
Alex Shuford III: And which we had, by the way, it was another chapter in my uh MBA that I didn't actually go to school to get.
31:32
Alex Shuford III: And we ended up in the end actually being able to acquire Hickory Chair, but then we had to go out and do a PR campaign that, hey, Hickory Chair is in really good shape.
31:41
Alex Shuford III: They were just caught up in this company.
31:43
Alex Shuford III: We own them now.
31:44
Alex Shuford III: It's okay, trust us, you know.
31:46
Alex Shuford III: And and that's been, I think, one of our strategies as we look at companies to buy is A, we want to we want to buy good companies with good people, right?
31:56
Alex Shuford III: We want companies that control their means of production, which is important to us.
32:00
Alex Shuford III: We run nine factories up in North Carolina.
32:02
Alex Shuford III: We're we're makers of furniture, and so we feel pretty strongly about that.
32:06
Alex Shuford III: But we don't ever want to buy something so broken that it distracts us from our primary companies and then causes us to, after we fix the broken thing, to have a problem on the main ships.
32:20
Alex Shuford III: Um and and Hickory Chair was that way.
32:22
Alex Shuford III: They were a great company, they were just caught up in a bad situation.
32:26
Alex Shuford III: The other thing we we want to provide is safe harbor for the sort of classic legacy brands in the industry.
32:33
Alex Shuford III: We think there's something wonderful about these brands that have been around for decades.
32:37
Alex Shuford III: And that the the up-and-coming consumers of furniture in this in the industry and up-and-coming designers, when they're told the story of the legacy, they begin to appreciate what that means because most of that hundred-plus year history of Hickory Chair goes into their product that they make today.
32:55
Alex Shuford III: Like you can't replace a hundred years of knowledge, right?
33:00
Alex Shuford III: And and that sort of inertia and legacy and how they go about things.
33:03
Alex Shuford III: You know, and for us to have enough competitive brands in the upper end that people, consumers, still see it as a space to buy it.
33:15
Tiffany Woolley: The names.
33:15
Tiffany Woolley: Right?
33:16
Alex Shuford III: If if all those brands go away, because Henry Don, Henry Don, which a lot of young designers won't even know today, when I was in the industry, was the upper end brand.
33:26
Alex Shuford III: They were they were, you know, owning Henry Don was you really made it in life.
33:30
Alex Shuford III: They were a 200 plus million dollar company selling the finest furniture made in America.
33:36
Alex Shuford III: They don't exist today.
33:38
Tiffany Woolley: I know, that's what breaks my heart.
33:39
Tiffany Woolley: Incredible.
33:40
Tiffany Woolley: It really does.
33:41
Alex Shuford III: And if you'd have told my father and my uncle, who competed with Henry Don for 40 years that that company, by the time that their nephew son was running Century, that that competitor would not exist, they would have lashed you out of the room.
33:55
Alex Shuford III: It was inconceivable that a company that strong and that iconic, it would be like Why do you think they don't exist now?
34:02
Scott Woolley: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
34:02
Alex Shuford III: It was it was a lot of choices made over a long So no one decision can kill a company as good as Henry Don, right?
34:09
Alex Shuford III: You you've got to string together twenty-five bad choices.
34:11
Alex Shuford III: Bad decision.
34:12
Alex Shuford III: Very true.
34:12
Alex Shuford III: I mean, it's just you have to work at converting bad.
34:16
Alex Shuford III: It was just too too strong.
34:19
Alex Shuford III: And you know, and so there was a lot of, I think, timing challenges, a lot of decisions made that didn't pan out well.
34:26
Alex Shuford III: Uh I'm sure the people involved in the company at the time would point to the offshoring of production that happened in the late 90s, early 2000s as a as a component in it.
34:36
Alex Shuford III: I mean, so a combination of bad luck, bad decisions, bad timing, you know, and then ownership that at the time, you know, was challenged with understanding an industry that is very nuanced, right?
34:50
Alex Shuford III: From from the outside, I think investors see furniture and think it's it's heavily branded, it's a big uh uh dollar purchase.
35:00
Alex Shuford III: We ought to be able to drive efficiency and make a lot of money.
35:04
Alex Shuford III: Like why can't we just do what Louis Vuitton does.
35:06
Alex Shuford III: I was just gonna say, like LVMH group does.
35:08
Alex Shuford III: They look at other luxury hoods and they go, This we should be able to have huge margins in this business.
35:12
Alex Shuford III: And what they underappreciate is that it's incredibly competitive to the point where the margins are very, very low.
35:19
Alex Shuford III: You know, that uh my staff will tell you, I I kind of laugh, that you know, if you want to be in the hall of fame in the furniture industry, you make four to five percent profit for ten years in a row and they'll put you in the hall of fame.
35:30
Alex Shuford III: Four or five percent profit margins in the industry that is as difficult as this one.
35:35
Alex Shuford III: And if you want to get run out of town, then you lose four or five percent for three years in a row and they'll run you out of town.
35:41
Alex Shuford III: Right.
35:41
Alex Shuford III: But success or failure in our industry is less than seven or eight percent swing on the margin side.
35:48
Alex Shuford III: And and so, you know, and the other thing that they underappreciate is the the distribution world is very fra it's thousand mom and pop retail stores and design firms and showrooms and and those are all driven by trust and relationship, right?
36:04
Alex Shuford III: Because when they come to the furniture market in High Point, they have a thousand choices for who to buy from.
36:10
Tiffany Woolley: So crazy, yeah.
36:11
Alex Shuford III: And so all of that is relationship, low margin, and then high turnover, meaning we're on a fashion cycle twice a year coming out with new product and all the development that goes with it, and all the inventory risk that comes with it.
36:23
Alex Shuford III: But an outsider doesn't see all that.
36:24
Alex Shuford III: They just see big multi-thousand dollar transactions and branded merchandise, and we ought to be able to kill it.
36:31
Alex Shuford III: Get one of our MBAs off the bench, some some guy, some lady that was educated at Harvard, plop them in there, and they'll they'll fix this and they'll run it smoothly and we'll make a ton of money.
36:40
Scott Woolley: There's one thing you didn't say which I think has a big factor in it, is storytelling.
36:44
Scott Woolley: Storytelling is allowed stories behind the business, stories behind the name, stories behind the items and the furniture.
36:50
Scott Woolley: I've always been a firm believer in selling anything.
36:52
Scott Woolley: Yeah.
36:52
Scott Woolley: If you've got a great story, because a story people will tell, you know, they'll tell their friend that story, and then that friend will tell another person that's how that brand grows.
37:01
Scott Woolley: And I agree with you.
37:02
Scott Woolley: Your brands, and I know that I've heard uh a podcast that you were on.
37:06
Scott Woolley: I you're a believer in stories and stories about just the individual items.
37:12
Scott Woolley: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
37:12
Alex Shuford III: Yeah.
37:12
Alex Shuford III: And I think there's an authenticity around the ability to even tell a story.
37:17
Alex Shuford III: Like that you know, that there are a lot of quickly developed companies that have sort of a marketing position, but they don't have a legacy and a story behind them.
37:27
Tiffany Woolley: No, and that's what's so special.
37:29
Alex Shuford III: The story behind the entity itself, and then and then how a product was developed how it came to be, right?
37:35
Alex Shuford III: We we work with a lot of great um product designers out there, and you know, they're passionate about the item, you know, the object, the why, the why there is that little step detail in the carving around the molding of the top.
37:47
Alex Shuford III: And one of my favorites is Thomas O'Brien, who is maybe the finest furniture designer who is an interior designer that you know maybe has ever walked the industry.
37:56
Alex Shuford III: You know, and and every element of every piece for him is not accidental.
38:01
Alex Shuford III: It's very purposeful.
38:02
Tiffany Woolley: Intentional.
38:03
Alex Shuford III: Intentional.
38:03
Alex Shuford III: And if you leave it out, he's gonna notice from across the room.
38:07
Alex Shuford III: And I remember that.
38:10
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah.
38:11
Alex Shuford III: One of the first things we ever developed for him are uh our product engineers, uh, you know, is a small table and there was this little step detail, and you know, and they didn't have the right tooling to do it just the size he drew it, and so they used a knife that you know cut that step detail that was different, it was just a little thicker.
38:28
Alex Shuford III: And they said, Well, look, it's save us a few hundred dollars.
38:31
Alex Shuford III: We don't have to cut a new knife, it's no big deal, it's not important.
38:34
Alex Shuford III: And he walked in the room, we had 12, 14 people in the room for this product development review meeting, and from 25 feet away, he stopped and looked at the table and he said, The molding's not right.
38:44
Alex Shuford III: The engineers, of course, right off the bat were like, Well, no, no, it's right, you know, and he was like, No, no, it's not right.
38:51
Alex Shuford III: Get the detail out and somebody give me a ruler.
38:53
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, that's what I always say to on the job sites.
38:56
Alex Shuford III: Where's my where's my give me my ruler and where's my detail?
38:58
Alex Shuford III: Where's my field plan?
39:00
Alex Shuford III: Um, because those things matter.
39:02
Alex Shuford III: And then the engineer thought, why would anybody notice Thomas's response when we got into discussion about it later is that that's a bad thing.
39:12
Alex Shuford III: That's right.
39:12
Alex Shuford III: Don't don't allow yourself to slip like that.
39:15
Alex Shuford III: And also, it's the combination of all the details in that table that make the whole a beautiful thing.
39:22
Alex Shuford III: And and once you start letting one or two of those details go, right, there's a point where it tips, right?
39:27
Alex Shuford III: And you may not be able to recognize that that detail completes it, but you just know it's beautiful.
39:33
Alex Shuford III: And every time you remove something, it's a little less so, and eventually it becomes less sellable and not sellable, and then not attractive, and then not a table you want to develop.
39:41
Scott Woolley: Each and every other detail, just elevating that's right more.
39:44
Alex Shuford III: Every time you are purposeful, and you know, and so I that storytelling of the why on the item, the storytelling of the why on the collection, the why on the brand, the who we are, um, and then the connection of all that back through relationship.
39:57
Alex Shuford III: You know, that when you walk into one of our showrooms at market, you typically see the same faces.
40:03
Alex Shuford III: Like we we're big believers and we want our people to be with us a long time.
40:08
Alex Shuford III: If you walk through our factories and do factory tours, we have 35-year employees, 40-year employees.
40:13
Alex Shuford III: We have we have a 53-year employee right now working in our main office at Century who's been with us.
40:20
Alex Shuford III: I'm 52 years old.
40:21
Alex Shuford III: She started a year before I was born.
40:23
Alex Shuford III: So amazing Debbie, if you're if you're listening, Debbie, uh, shout out to you.
40:28
Alex Shuford III: But like that, that is the the sort of bedrock of the company is that tribal knowledge, and it gets handed down.
40:35
Alex Shuford III: We do a retirement breakfast, so our retirees come back to Century a couple of times a year and we'll feed them and we tell them how the company's doing.
40:42
Alex Shuford III: And you know, these are people that have been retired 10, 15, 20 years.
40:45
Alex Shuford III: Right, but we probably love the room with retirees.
40:48
Alex Shuford III: And I tell them at the end of every breakfast, um, I say, look, thank you for being here.
40:53
Alex Shuford III: Thank you for caring about us and for letting us stand on your shoulders.
40:57
Alex Shuford III: And if you continue to want to help the company, when you're out in the community and you see a great young person who is earnest and wants to find a company that they want to make a career with, send them our way.
41:09
Alex Shuford III: Said, I don't really care what their skill set is, I care what their personality is.
41:13
Alex Shuford III: If they show up on time, they want to learn, they want to work hard, you'll know who they are and put in a good word for us because you pay it forward by getting us the next you that'll be with us for 30 or 40 years.
41:25
Alex Shuford III: So we can't.
41:26
Scott Woolley: You could do all the things that are the right things.
41:28
Scott Woolley: Right.
41:29
Scott Woolley: And a lot of things that people don't even think about doing or don't want to put the effort into doing.
41:33
Scott Woolley: Yeah.
41:34
Alex Shuford III: It's the culture piece, right?
41:35
Scott Woolley: And that word gets it gets tossed around a lot, but I think at its root again, that goes back to stories, because people will tell that story.
41:43
Scott Woolley: I retired 10 years or five years ago, and I would came back for a breakfast.
41:47
Scott Woolley: And they'll tell five friends, and those friends will say they took you back for a breakfast.
41:51
Scott Woolley: That's right.
41:51
Scott Woolley: And you retired there five years ago, what kind of company?
41:58
Alex Shuford III: I may send Billy over there.
41:59
Alex Shuford III: I might send Jane over there because and I think you know, for me, culture is a real simple thing to define.
42:06
Alex Shuford III: It's what your people do when you're not around to keep an eye on them.
42:10
Alex Shuford III: Yeah.
42:10
Alex Shuford III: It's like, do they make the extra effort?
42:13
Alex Shuford III: Do they pick up the piece of trash or walk past it?
42:15
Alex Shuford III: Do they, you know, it's when they're not being watched, how do they carry themselves?
42:20
Alex Shuford III: Right.
42:20
Tiffany Woolley: And do they have that heart in them?
42:23
Tiffany Woolley: You know, Scott and I both came from family businesses, and I appreciate that so tremendously.
42:30
Tiffany Woolley: And one thing I love about iDesign Lab and all the wonderful representatives of businesses, and even the ones I meet with regularly in the office, a lot of them are family-ran operations.
42:43
Tiffany Woolley: And I feel like the industry, even though it's been my world for so many years, my whole life really, I feel like it's an untapped industry at the same time.
42:53
Tiffany Woolley: Like I feel like it's not the one people are talking about all the time or the one you don't really hear about.
42:59
Tiffany Woolley: You know, and I just part of with iDesign Lab is really selling that story that this is a family industry and a great place to hang your hat.
43:10
Tiffany Woolley: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
43:10
Alex Shuford III: And it's and it's unlike a lot of industries, it's a very tightly networked industry that people are supportive of each other, um, that there's a great community thread that runs through it.
43:22
Alex Shuford III: Like, I mean, some of my uh good friends are some of my you know biggest competitors, you know, and we look between the hours of eight and five, we're trying to, you know, get each other's floor sample opportunity, you know, figure out how to get more of our business from them.
43:38
Alex Shuford III: And you know, but before and after, we we share information all the time.
43:41
Alex Shuford III: Like how, you know, do you need to come by and look at a piece of equipment?
43:44
Alex Shuford III: What are you doing in this area from a healthcare standpoint?
43:47
Alex Shuford III: Right.
43:48
Alex Shuford III: You know, just trying to make sure that the overall industry is healthy.
43:52
Alex Shuford III: And then I think that network and relationship back with our customers uh and then among our customers with each other, it's different than you see in a lot of other industries that have become very uh uh sort of polarized, just two or three brands dominating it.
44:08
Alex Shuford III: Um the the last of the great sort of cottage industries that is scaled large.
44:14
Alex Shuford III: I mean it's a huge industry.
44:15
Alex Shuford III: It's a fifty billion dollar industry, but it's a cottage industry.
44:18
Alex Shuford III: It is, it is what I think it makes it sort of fun.
44:22
Alex Shuford III: So and there's no better place to see that.
44:24
Alex Shuford III: You go to the trade shows and it's just no you know, people you know, people that haven't seen each other in a year or six months, and oh my god, how are you doing?
44:31
Alex Shuford III: Let's go have a drink, let's catch up.
44:32
Alex Shuford III: It is oh what are you doing about this in your business?
44:35
Alex Shuford III: How are you using these tools?
44:36
Alex Shuford III: Or what are you doing on Instagram?
44:38
Alex Shuford III: You know, and and people are sharing and they're networking, and it's and it's really pretty fabulous.
44:43
Tiffany Woolley: So as you know, the industry is continuing to grow as I are.
44:48
Tiffany Woolley: How do you um see like the future with the growth?
44:54
Tiffany Woolley: I mean, it's interesting because I do talk to reps who come in and you know, like I know Cravit was recently purchased, which kind of shocked me, I guess.
45:02
Tiffany Woolley: I don't know why.
45:03
Tiffany Woolley: I guess I was kind of in love with their family story too.
45:08
Alex Shuford III: And you know, you just start to wonder, especially since I first started in the industry, everything was more segregated, and now it's all kind of I think, you know, and I mean the Kravitz are good friends, wonderful family, um, and are still obviously very involved in the business.
45:26
Alex Shuford III: I I think w their situation is is sort of a a good example.
45:30
Alex Shuford III: Like businesses reach a certain size where it's not a guarantee that the next generation is uh necessarily going to want to run it or be ready to run it or whatever the case may be.
45:43
Alex Shuford III: And it may be that that next leg of the journey needs to be in partnership with you know another group.
45:49
Alex Shuford III: And um I don't know the the people that bought into Kravit.
45:53
Alex Shuford III: I know the Kravitz kept a large share of the company themselves and are still involved, but I think the group, as I hear them described, is very interested in operating businesses and you know, and I think you know, kind of famously they've also they've got a rug company they own and a lighting company, and they're trying to knit together a nice group.
46:11
Alex Shuford III: Um but even even our family, when we look at you know where we are, we've got a you know, we've we've built a business that's now big enough and complex enough that it's you know that that it's hard to run.
46:22
Alex Shuford III: It like fortunately we've got a lot of good people and they overcome my bad management.
46:27
Alex Shuford III: Um But at the end of the day, it's it's a it's a big, messy company.
46:31
Alex Shuford III: We have 1,700 employees, nine factories, five different management teams, you know, it's a big old cacophony of chaos that happens to work.
46:40
Alex Shuford III: How many brands are what are the So the total brand portfolio is is really kind of seven brands, and and there's six of them that are residential facing.
46:48
Alex Shuford III: So Century, Hickory Chair, Highland House, Hancock and Moore, Jessica Charles, and Maitland Smith.
46:55
Alex Shuford III: And then we have a commercial brand called Cabot Wren uh with a little sub brand called St.
47:01
Alex Shuford III: Timothy's, and they sell uh commercial seating for office and country clubs and things of that nature.
47:07
Alex Shuford III: We show that brand up at Neocon.
47:09
Alex Shuford III: Um but the other brands are you know, there's sort of all this sort of commingled, each with a little bit of an identity.
47:16
Alex Shuford III: Um, but each one of them has, again, that that sort of self-directed autonomy, uh, which is wonderful because it makes us, I think, vibrant.
47:25
Alex Shuford III: But it's it's also you can imagine sometimes the sub you know all the kids fight with each other.
47:29
Alex Shuford III: So you know, and sometimes we have to get in a room and we have to talk it out.
47:32
Scott Woolley: Like, hey, you're do they all have their own separate offices and different offices, separate sales managers, separate marketing staff, separate sales rooms.
47:39
Scott Woolley: Do you share any of the uh manufacturing between them?
47:42
Alex Shuford III: Some of the brands sell uh share a little bit of manufacturing, so they're fabrics.
47:47
Alex Shuford III: That's right.
47:47
Alex Shuford III: We do allow famously we allow you to move all the fabrics around between brands.
47:52
Alex Shuford III: Um but uh we we operate legally in three silos.
47:56
Alex Shuford III: So the there's a Century Highland House legal entity, and then there's a Hickory Chair legal entity, and then there's a Hancock and more Jessica Charles Maitland Smith legal entity that also rolls up Cabot Ren there, and then those three legal entities are all owned by the Rock House company, the parent company.
48:14
Alex Shuford III: And then so my day job is sort of CEO of Rock House, but I'm also president of Sentry Furniture.
48:19
Alex Shuford III: So I'm down there amongst the brand presidents fighting it out with the other brand presidents.
48:24
Tiffany Woolley: That's funny.
48:25
Alex Shuford III: Which is funny, yeah.
48:26
Alex Shuford III: So we you know it's a lot of fun, and it and uh you know, and again, it keeps us, I think, vibrant because each of those brands is exploring, and and oftentimes we're stepping on each other's toes because if somebody sees something in the zeitgeist of the customer base that is becoming interesting and popular, hopefully I've got enough smart brand presidents that more than one person is seeing it and they're pursuing the same thing.
48:50
Alex Shuford III: And then we'll get that well, I saw it first and I want to do it, and you know, well, why don't you keep them?
48:54
Alex Shuford III: You know, no, no, no.
48:55
Alex Shuford III: Let's see who does it better.
48:56
Alex Shuford III: Like chase it.
48:59
Alex Shuford III: Let's, you know, if that's what's popular, if that's what our designers and our salespeople are interested in, then by all means, let's have multiple boats chasing that point in the in the on the horizon.
49:10
Alex Shuford III: Um but yeah, no, I think one of the things in this business that you know is is sort of the calling card for young people to get in it for is that that feeling of community and that ability to make a difference.
49:25
Alex Shuford III: Because look, I I get that it's appealing to go after a big Fortune 500 job and you know you're gonna but if you are creative, if you are somebody that is empathetic, that knows how to connect with people, uh a AI-proof job of the future is somebody that can interact with other human beings in a personable way.
49:45
Speaker 5: Right.
49:45
Alex Shuford III: Because guess what?
49:46
Alex Shuford III: If you can do your job completely behind a computer screen remotely, probably some version of the future JAT GPT is going to be able to do that better than being cheaper.
49:55
Alex Shuford III: But if part of your job and so much of design and so much of furniture is that that interaction with the client, that ability to see them, feel them, understand them, you know, administer a project, make sure it goes smoothly, be physically on site while the drapery installer is there, and the countertop people, like that is an in-person, human-to-human job, and it's not going to be replaced by AI tools.
50:19
Alex Shuford III: Now, it may be enhanced by AI tools.
50:21
Alex Shuford III: But it won't be replaced.
50:24
Tiffany Woolley: And I've, you know, that's been some of my own research that I've been coming across that it's really an industry that really AI won't tap into.
50:31
Tiffany Woolley: And and I think that should be celebrated as having teenage daughters.
50:37
Tiffany Woolley: You know, I like we keep pushing towards like a high point concept for college and like learn life skills.
50:44
Tiffany Woolley: Learn life skills.
50:45
Tiffany Woolley: And, you know, I just like want to bring in, you know, as much information for this industry.
50:52
Tiffany Woolley: Where do you see designers and consumers as part of the industry growth for you and your brands?
51:01
Alex Shuford III: I mean, the biggest part of what we do is we sell to and through the trade.
51:06
Alex Shuford III: You know, so we have corporate showrooms around the country, great agent partners around the country that are our sort of physical representation in the local markets.
51:14
Alex Shuford III: We sell a lot of wonderful design firms through those networks that are vibrant, that are, that are interacting with what I would say is the upper sort of uh layer of consumers.
51:26
Alex Shuford III: Um, you know, and we're obviously a luxury products company, so we're, you know, we're we're sort of focused on that niche.
51:32
Alex Shuford III: Um but a lot of our retailers are are figuring out how to remake themselves and do a better job of capturing the sort of uh excitement component that has to go along with luxury sales these days.
51:46
Alex Shuford III: And you know, and that wasn't the case when I first got back in the business.
51:49
Alex Shuford III: A lot of the retail stores that were out there, you know, had suspect housekeeping.
51:54
Alex Shuford III: You'd walk in and it was underwhelming.
51:55
Alex Shuford III: They had they had a lot of space, but they might not be using that space wisely.
51:59
Alex Shuford III: Totally.
52:03
Alex Shuford III: You know, and and sums up the interests.
52:05
Alex Shuford III: That's right.
52:06
Alex Shuford III: So and I think that transition is afoot right now where where people are realizing, and and partly credit to Gary Friedman and what he did with restoration hardware, credit to John Reed and what he did with our house.
52:19
Alex Shuford III: But you know, what those uh mob brand retailers do really well is is they make the space beautiful in which they show their product.
52:28
Alex Shuford III: Without it.
52:29
Alex Shuford III: So when you walk in, you're inspired.
52:31
Alex Shuford III: And I think our retailers um had to relearn that lesson.
52:35
Tiffany Woolley: Right.
52:36
Alex Shuford III: You know, it's not about just the bulk of space.
52:38
Alex Shuford III: Right.
52:39
Alex Shuford III: It's about how well you utilize it.
52:40
Alex Shuford III: Is it inspiring?
52:42
Alex Shuford III: That's right.
52:42
Alex Shuford III: And and does it reflect to that high-end customer uh confidence that this is somebody that I feel like can handle a transaction for me?
52:51
Alex Shuford III: Because every other product that they buy is bought from someone that reflects back to them a feeling of of you know of high-end execution.
53:00
Alex Shuford III: You walk into a Mercedes-Benz dealership and it is reflecting precision and confidence.
53:06
Alex Shuford III: You walk into a Louis Vuitton, you know, store and it is reflecting that same thing.
53:11
Alex Shuford III: And and so that elevation, and I think we're in the early stages of it of retail re-elevating from a display standpoint will, I hope, create a revitalization in U.S.
53:23
Alex Shuford III: furniture retail.
53:25
Alex Shuford III: Um the design side, I think, is always going to be strong.
53:28
Alex Shuford III: I think if you are um if you're doing anything more than simply buying a couple of pieces that have have have worn out in your house, if you're doing a room or you're doing a floor or you're doing a house, you want somebody to administer that for you.
53:43
Alex Shuford III: You know, and and part of administration is somebody with great taste that's saying, no, let's do A and not B.
53:48
Alex Shuford III: You know, and again we talk AI.
53:50
Alex Shuford III: AI can render your room 400 times.
53:52
Alex Shuford III: Right.
53:52
Alex Shuford III: But it can't tell you which one's in good taste.
53:54
Alex Shuford III: No.
53:54
Alex Shuford III: So the designer needs to do that.
53:56
Alex Shuford III: But even more importantly, then it's the designer that says, okay, we've put together something beautiful.
54:02
Alex Shuford III: Now we actually have to make it a physical reality.
54:05
Alex Shuford III: And that's a journey.
54:06
Alex Shuford III: It is a journey.
54:07
Alex Shuford III: If you've been on that journey ever alone, it is arduous and lonely and full of mistakes.
54:13
Tiffany Woolley: And it shouldn't be walked alone.
54:14
Tiffany Woolley: I feel like I try to paint that picture all the time.
54:18
Tiffany Woolley: That again, I kind of repeat that this industry still has so much growth because you know we'll spend money on clothing, like you said, a car.
54:28
Tiffany Woolley: And then when it comes to like selling a room or a sofa, people are like, well, I mean, meanwhile, that's your life.
54:35
Tiffany Woolley: That is your more time on that sofa than you do in your car.
54:38
Alex Shuford III: Correct.
54:38
Alex Shuford III: More time on that sofa than you do almost anything else.
54:41
Tiffany Woolley: Exactly.
54:41
Alex Shuford III: And I think most people keep that sofa for way too long, but replace it more frequently.
54:46
Alex Shuford III: Right, right.
54:47
Tiffany Woolley: Exactly.
54:48
Alex Shuford III: No, absolutely.
54:49
Alex Shuford III: You're making a decision that is going to influence your happiness at the beginning and end of every day and your most important time.
54:56
Alex Shuford III: You know, uh look, there's a lot of cultures who have a history of this idea that space is a is a health component.
55:04
Alex Shuford III: It it's something that can make you live better, live longer, and live healthier, you know, and the Japanese famously so, but lots of cultures.
55:13
Alex Shuford III: I think in America we're waking up to that, but we haven't appreciated it as much as we should.
55:19
Alex Shuford III: That beauty around you will lift your spirits.
55:22
Alex Shuford III: Being a better, more positive person will make your life healthier and happier.
55:29
Alex Shuford III: If you are healthier and happier, you're likely to live longer.
55:31
Alex Shuford III: I mean, it's just And it's the pride thing too.
55:34
Tiffany Woolley: You work hard, you spend your hard-earned money on curate in a beautiful curated space on quality products.
55:40
Tiffany Woolley: Like it makes you want to entertain, it makes you want to keep you know, you're comfortable in that pride, I guess.
55:48
Alex Shuford III: I have never been disappointed in life when I spend a little bit more for something nicer.
55:53
Alex Shuford III: You know, and and at the like in the moment, you you go, uh, and you you sort of squint and you go, should I?
55:58
Alex Shuford III: But then on the back side of it, I'm always a big thing.
56:00
Tiffany Woolley: The reward is there.
56:02
Alex Shuford III: By myself into a nicer hotel room, I'm always happier.
56:04
Alex Shuford III: A little bit nicer meal, I'm always happier.
56:06
Alex Shuford III: Nicer pair of pants, always happier.
56:08
Alex Shuford III: Nicer pair of shoes, I'll, you know, and and you know, same thing.
56:10
Alex Shuford III: Like, could I get a dollar a cup of coffee or can I go get a five dollar cup of coffee?
56:13
Alex Shuford III: I'm happier at the end of the coffee.
56:15
Tiffany Woolley: It is so much.
56:16
Tiffany Woolley: It is, it's all based in that experience.
56:19
Alex Shuford III: But to your point about a designer, a designer is a companion to come along with you on your design journey, who is, you know, a guide, uh, a sherpa to make sure that things go smoothly and well, that you end up at the destination that you want to end up at, which may not be the destination you set off to end up at.
56:37
Alex Shuford III: But along that way, you're sharing it, of course, with your partner, your spouse, and your family, but you're also sharing it with this designer who becomes this like this lifestyle coach.
56:47
Tiffany Woolley: Yes.
56:47
Alex Shuford III: Right?
56:47
Alex Shuford III: And oftentimes, and I talk to people a lot that have designers that they've worked with for decades, and they are some of their closest friends and confidants.
56:56
Alex Shuford III: And when they list their advisors, they say, my accountant, my lawyer, my designer, and my doctor.
57:01
Alex Shuford III: And I'm like, wow.
57:03
Tiffany Woolley: It's true, but all of them are wonderful relationships that continue, evolve, and that process should be fun.
57:12
Alex Shuford III: Like you're you're redoing your house.
57:14
Alex Shuford III: Like, guess what?
57:15
Alex Shuford III: It's not gonna all happen on time.
57:17
Alex Shuford III: Something is gonna go wrong along the way.
57:19
Alex Shuford III: Like, roll with it, enjoy it as a process.
57:22
Alex Shuford III: I I I'm a well, I'd like to say I'm a big fisherman.
57:26
Alex Shuford III: I am a fisherman who's not that good at it.
57:28
Alex Shuford III: But part of going fly fishing is not the two fish you're gonna catch.
57:32
Alex Shuford III: It's the day of going fly fishing it's the art of the outfit.
57:36
Alex Shuford III: It's like getting your gear ready ahead of time.
57:38
Alex Shuford III: It's it's driving there and enjoying the beauty, it's putting your waders on and getting your rod set up, it's walking down to the river, it's figuring out what fly you're gonna- Taking it all in.
57:48
Alex Shuford III: It's not the minute and a half where you catch the fish, it's the day of fishing.
57:52
Alex Shuford III: And that's the same thing in design.
57:54
Alex Shuford III: It's the process, it's fun, it's interesting.
57:57
Tiffany Woolley: And there's just so much beauty out there.
58:00
Tiffany Woolley: I mean, I wish I could take every client to a high point showroom.
58:04
Tiffany Woolley: You know, I wish people could see all that beauty that is out there.
58:10
Tiffany Woolley: And I hope that as a design team, you know, that's what we do bring to the table, bring them, you know, all this extra elegance that is out there.
58:20
Tiffany Woolley: Because even with the restoration hardware of the world, I mean, I get a little it's it's you know, it's again trying to pigeonhole uh con you know, it's like the cookie cutter house mentality, which I understand.
58:34
Tiffany Woolley: They have their looking look, but I'm all wanting to like.
58:38
Tiffany Woolley: There's so much more variety out there.
58:40
Alex Shuford III: And is their look appropriate for some people?
58:42
Alex Shuford III: Sure.
58:43
Alex Shuford III: But not for everybody.
58:44
Alex Shuford III: And the amount of pattern and color and and surface detail and you know the and that's again in our industry, it's the cacophony.
58:52
Alex Shuford III: It's all of the different instruments in that orchestra where you walk into a show and you go, My goodness, you know, we have not fallen prey to homogenization as an industry where everybody has to look the same.
59:06
Alex Shuford III: Find your identity, be unique, do something that makes you happy.
59:10
Alex Shuford III: Don't buy page 32.
59:12
Tiffany Woolley: Right.
59:13
Alex Shuford III: Do you, right?
59:14
Alex Shuford III: Do you.
59:15
Tiffany Woolley: I like that.
59:16
Tiffany Woolley: So with the social media world we live in, I always say, like, you know, people are your own brand now from literally from childhood.
59:24
Tiffany Woolley: These kids are on there.
59:26
Tiffany Woolley: Do you guys use social media as a big tool?
59:31
Alex Shuford III: We do.
59:32
Alex Shuford III: I don't I don't know that we use it as well as we could, but I think probably every company CEO says that.
59:39
Alex Shuford III: Um it's a fundamental part of our marketing and our messaging and and our storytelling, as we mentioned earlier, and and we're trying to show some behind the scenes, you know, what it looks like what's happening in the factory, what's happening in the showrooms, uh trying to connect people back to us.
59:54
Alex Shuford III: Um, but I think that revolution of democratization.
59:59
Alex Shuford III: Of customer access.
1:00:02
Alex Shuford III: You know, and it it's been tough, obviously, for our shelter magazine partners.
1:00:06
Alex Shuford III: It used to be if you wanted to put your image and your message in front of a customer, you had to go through architectural digest or traditional home or whoever it was.
1:00:15
Alex Shuford III: And it was expensive, so it was done infrequently, it was hard to do.
1:00:19
Alex Shuford III: Nowadays you can get your message out there incredibly easily and affordably.
1:00:23
Alex Shuford III: But because you they're not these only sort of narrow, bully pulpits, the you have these narrow pipelines like they used to be in the past.
1:00:32
Alex Shuford III: Now it's everybody has the same access.
1:00:34
Alex Shuford III: The audience is smaller and smaller.
1:00:37
Alex Shuford III: Where, you know, if you ran an ad and still today, if you run an ad in architectural digest, you know, hundreds of thousands of people may see it.
1:00:43
Alex Shuford III: If you go put something up on on Instagram, well, you know, dozens and dozens of people may see it.
1:00:48
Alex Shuford III: You know, so you have to be more active and it's changed the way we think.
1:00:53
Alex Shuford III: Uh again, are we good at it?
1:00:55
Alex Shuford III: We're okay.
1:00:56
Alex Shuford III: Can we be better for sure?
1:00:58
Alex Shuford III: Do I think it's an improvement over what used to exist?
1:01:02
Alex Shuford III: It's like everything.
1:01:03
Alex Shuford III: It's better in some ways and worse in others.
1:01:05
Tiffany Woolley: Right.
1:01:05
Alex Shuford III: Um and we're we're still big fans of our Shelter magazine friends.
1:01:08
Alex Shuford III: We're about to do, uh matter of fact, the the flower show house in Nashville with a lot of our partners.
1:01:14
Alex Shuford III: Uh and I think a lot of those media properties have figured out how to go beyond just the printed publication.
1:01:20
Alex Shuford III: Now they they are event organizers, they're experience organizers, you know, and then their printed publication is sort of this platform that they then showcase all this experience creation they do.
1:01:33
Alex Shuford III: And so they've evolved.
1:01:35
Alex Shuford III: Um and that's the you know, I tell our young people all the time that you know, look, I don't know what it's gonna look like in three years, but I can guarantee you it's gonna be 100% different than it is today, dramatically so.
1:01:48
Alex Shuford III: And we need to be nimble, we need to be comfortable with evolution, we need to be willing to break parts of our business and throw parts of our business away and engage with new things and experiment and and m mess up.
1:01:59
Alex Shuford III: Like I trust me, I before 10 o'clock every morning I mess up four or five times, right?
1:02:04
Alex Shuford III: And some of them are quite expensive.
1:02:05
Alex Shuford III: It's like but you gotta you have to be durable enough to survive them and you have to be comfortable enough with risk that you're willing to roll the dice.
1:02:12
Alex Shuford III: Um and the companies that get rigid and and start to move into the protectionist mentality.
1:02:18
Alex Shuford III: Let's just not lose any of what we've gathered.
1:02:20
Alex Shuford III: Right.
1:02:21
Alex Shuford III: Well, guess what?
1:02:21
Alex Shuford III: They're always gonna leak between your fingers, and if you squeeze harder, they leak faster.
1:02:25
Alex Shuford III: So it's much better to say, be willing to lose it all, you know, be willing to lose big chunks of it and and be out there.
1:02:32
Alex Shuford III: Take the risk.
1:02:34
Alex Shuford III: And it's very hard for our young executives because I think they've grown up in a very risk-averse world.
1:02:40
Alex Shuford III: You get the right grade, go to the right school, do the right situation, like always do the right situation.
1:02:44
Alex Shuford III: Yeah, and and you know, always get a trophy for, you know, but sometimes you're gonna lose.
1:02:49
Alex Shuford III: And when you lose, it's okay.
1:02:51
Alex Shuford III: And and we spend a lot of time uh talking about what we did wrong in a very easy, comfortable conversation.
1:02:58
Alex Shuford III: But why did that not work?
1:02:59
Alex Shuford III: We thought we thought that sofa was gonna be wonderful.
1:03:01
Alex Shuford III: No one bought it.
1:03:02
Alex Shuford III: Why?
1:03:02
Alex Shuford III: Let's let's audit our own problem.
1:03:04
Alex Shuford III: You know, what did what did we get wrong about it?
1:03:06
Alex Shuford III: We thought that marketing message would really land, but my gosh, the comments on social media are terrible.
1:03:12
Alex Shuford III: Like, what did we miss here?
1:03:13
Alex Shuford III: Um we thought this new brand that we were gonna stand up was gonna be this huge success, you know, because uh for me and for a lot of people, the failures that we've had are a whole lot more constructive than the successes we've had.
1:03:28
Alex Shuford III: And uh and I want to teach that to our our next generation that it's okay to put yourself out there, to take responsibility, to have it not work out, and to raise your hand and say, I'm sorry, but I've thought through it.
1:03:41
Alex Shuford III: I think I did these two or three things differently, um, and I should have done them this way.
1:03:45
Alex Shuford III: I want to try again, that grit to get back up, make it sleep on the Scotts towels boxes for a few nights, figure it out, re reshelve the shelves and put something else there next to the cash register, because what I had right there no one's buying.
1:04:00
Alex Shuford III: Right.
1:04:00
Alex Shuford III: Write it those lessons you learn.
1:04:02
Alex Shuford III: It was a great book.
1:04:03
Alex Shuford III: I'm curious if you ever read it.
1:04:05
Alex Shuford III: Um, it was by a uh author named Paco Underhill, and it's called Why We Buy.
1:04:10
Alex Shuford III: And it's about the science of retail.
1:04:12
Alex Shuford III: And as a former grocery store owner, it would be right up your alley.
1:04:15
Scott Woolley: I I just finished writing a book called it's called Pitch Sell Sold.
1:04:19
Alex Shuford III: Pitch Sell Sold.
1:04:20
Alex Shuford III: I'll look it up.
1:04:21
Alex Shuford III: That's cool.
1:04:21
Alex Shuford III: But yeah, the the why we buy, a lot of it is the psychology of where you place a product, how it's packaged, that whole like the psychology of all those things that matter.
1:04:32
Alex Shuford III: And there's a great lesson in there when I was a retailer of if you put your aisles too close together and you put a product mid-aisle, and a lady has to reach down to grab it, she's concerned about somebody bumping into her from behind, and she will not do that.
1:04:46
Alex Shuford III: And so you have to give her space to reach down to grab a product, and if you don't, then that product placement mid-location, which you think is wonderful because it's reachable, is terrible.
1:04:55
Alex Shuford III: And you'll kill your product sales.
1:04:56
Alex Shuford III: And you go, my goodness.
1:04:58
Scott Woolley: Well, just being on the bottom shelf compared to eye level.
1:05:00
Scott Woolley: Bottom left eye level.
1:05:03
Alex Shuford III: Everybody used to think that putting it right in a pop-up display right as somebody comes in the store, but it takes them 20, 30 feet to like gather themselves and get their wits about them.
1:05:11
Alex Shuford III: So that first ten feet is useless.
1:05:13
Alex Shuford III: And well, they see it on the way out.
1:05:16
Alex Shuford III: Well, they're already past the cash register, it's too late.
1:05:18
Alex Shuford III: You know, it's just those those basics.
1:05:20
Alex Shuford III: And I it always fascinated me.
1:05:21
Alex Shuford III: It's like the the psychology of how you make somebody see, feel, and want your product, and then post-purchase, how do you deliver in a way that makes them want to repeat?
1:05:33
Alex Shuford III: And you know, our brands are very much that way, which is we survive because people's parents owned Hickory Chair in Century.
1:05:41
Alex Shuford III: Oh, yeah.
1:05:41
Alex Shuford III: And then they bought a piece of the thing.
1:05:43
Alex Shuford III: That was back to the story.
1:05:44
Alex Shuford III: That's right.
1:05:45
Alex Shuford III: Trust and confidence that, well, why did you choose us over another brand?
1:05:50
Alex Shuford III: Well, because because I've heard about you from others that love what they bought from you.
1:05:54
Alex Shuford III: Or I made a purchase four or five years ago, and now I'm ready to add to it, and that has held up so well, and my experience has been so good with it that I want to buy again from you.
1:06:04
Alex Shuford III: Very different from the disposable.
1:06:06
Alex Shuford III: We're we're durable.
1:06:07
Alex Shuford III: So and with a durable purchase, it has to continue to provide delight and enjoyment over a long period of time.
1:06:14
Alex Shuford III: Because if it in six months it starts to fail on you, well, you have failed the durable purchase test.
1:06:19
Alex Shuford III: Right.
1:06:20
Alex Shuford III: Right.
1:06:20
Scott Woolley: So I have to ask you one last question.
1:06:22
Scott Woolley: You know, everyone gets a job for the first time where they get hired to be run a company.
1:06:28
Scott Woolley: You got hired to run a company, but it wasn't just running a company, it was running a company that your family started, your grandfather started.
1:06:37
Scott Woolley: How did that weigh on you?
1:06:38
Scott Woolley: Does it still to this day?
1:06:39
Scott Woolley: Still to this day.
1:06:40
Scott Woolley: Absolutely.
1:06:42
Alex Shuford III: Um Because that's a lot I I feel to carry.
1:06:45
Alex Shuford III: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
1:06:45
Alex Shuford III: It was a lot of anxiety.
1:06:47
Alex Shuford III: And I you know, so when they when they put me in charge, so I had worked there for a while and and then when when we bought Century from the rest of the family at that point in time, you know, my dad made me president and said, All right, you know, don't mess it up.
1:07:00
Scott Woolley: Did you ever have a goal of wanting to run your family's business?
1:07:03
Alex Shuford III: I think early.
1:07:05
Alex Shuford III: Um but at some point uh while working at Century in various uh different layers or levels, you know, I started to have that aspiration that I that I thought I could.
1:07:17
Alex Shuford III: Right.
1:07:17
Alex Shuford III: Right.
1:07:17
Alex Shuford III: You you end up with sort of vague goal of, well, maybe one day if it's possible, and then you start to get the confidence that well I think I could do this.
1:07:24
Alex Shuford III: And then as any sort of mid-level executive will tell you that over time you see enough decisions that you think you would have made differently that you start thinking, well, I maybe not only do I think I can, but I think I might be able to even do it better.
1:07:38
Alex Shuford III: Um but then when you get you get handed the keys, you go, literally, ooh, hang on.
1:07:44
Alex Shuford III: And there's a moment of of anxiety, and and I was I'm very comfortable in risk.
1:07:49
Alex Shuford III: Um, you know, so you know, I as hobbies, you know, I was a rock climber and a mountain biker, and you know, and you know, like plunging off a cliff and not knowing what's at the bottom was something that you know and and then that sort of carried over into getting into my own retail operation and you know, which you know, like that that sort of tolerant um risk kind of mindset is I think an important part of my early running of century, which was, you know, we were rolling the dice.
1:08:17
Alex Shuford III: We, you know, we were buying this furniture company and it was at an interesting time because it was post-the 2008-9 housing collapse.
1:08:24
Alex Shuford III: We had not completely rebuilt the revenue level of the company, and here you are, good luck, and by the way, there's a pile of debt figured out.
1:08:31
Alex Shuford III: Um, I had some pretty good shepherds, some pretty good mentors.
1:08:36
Alex Shuford III: Uh, but for that first five, six months, what I did is sort of I I I kind of doubled down on what I knew.
1:08:42
Alex Shuford III: Like I was a product guy, I knew the upholstery side really well, um, I knew the customer and what they were dealing with because I had come from retail.
1:08:52
Alex Shuford III: You know, and so I think anytime you get that anxiety of, you know, gosh, I could make a decision big enough here to to lose the company, you sort of double down on you know the bedrocks uh of what you've learned before.
1:09:03
Alex Shuford III: But but probably the bigger one for me was not really post-purchase of century, but the scariest time of my career was the pandemic in May when we were forced to shut the factories down.
1:09:16
Alex Shuford III: So the government order came in, and you know, a good example is our our case goods factory in Hickory, North Carolina has never been closed for more than a week at a time since 1949, right?
1:09:28
Alex Shuford III: And there I was in week three, and when I mean shut down, it was everything was shut down.
1:09:34
Alex Shuford III: It was the air compressors were shut down, that it it didn't hum.
1:09:38
Alex Shuford III: You know, even when it shut down for holiday for a week, you know, the there's all these systems that are still running, it's still noisy, it's still I mean, it was dead quiet, dead dark, no one coming in to work, and I would drive in just because I couldn't sit at home, so I'd drive in, park my car, unlock the factory, and I would just walk around just to kind of get my head straight.
1:09:57
Alex Shuford III: And I'd do it almost obsessively every day.
1:09:59
Alex Shuford III: I'd walk, I'd drive to the office, and our case goods factory, it's huge, eight, nine hundred squirrel thousand square foot building connected to the main office.
1:10:07
Alex Shuford III: So I I'd sit in my office, I'd get you know kind of twitchy, and I'd walk out in the factory, and I'd just walk the whole factory.
1:10:14
Alex Shuford III: I'd just make it almost like a daily ritual.
1:10:17
Alex Shuford III: And uh every day I'd think, it's got to reopen.
1:10:20
Scott Woolley: It's gonna be you know and then those other documentary in that in what we were talking about.
1:10:25
Scott Woolley: It was uh it was a interesting story.
1:10:27
Alex Shuford III: Yeah, and and but that fear of if it doesn't reopen, that's that's kind of on me.
1:10:32
Alex Shuford III: Like there'll be extenuating circumstances, but history will still write that like it closed, never reopened, and it was Alex Schuford III running it when it did, third generation, and here it is.
1:10:43
Alex Shuford III: And you know, and so that that determination to figure it out, to you know, like we will uh is a funny story when when we finally got the order to be able to reopen the facility.
1:10:57
Scott Woolley: How much time passed?
1:10:58
Alex Shuford III: We were closed for a total, I think, of five weeks.
1:11:01
Alex Shuford III: We were able for one week in the tail end to kind of reopen and and then close back down, kind of pulse our way back open.
1:11:09
Alex Shuford III: Um you know, but the longest stretch was I think we were pushing three and a half uh to nearly four weeks where we were closed down completely.
1:11:18
Alex Shuford III: And that was that affect employees.
1:11:20
Alex Shuford III: We we continued to pay most of our we didn't get a we were too big to get a PPP loan.
1:11:26
Alex Shuford III: Um so a little known fact, but any company over a thousand employees uh didn't qualify for a loan.
1:11:33
Alex Shuford III: Um and so I was pretty irritated about it.
1:11:36
Alex Shuford III: We had done everything that the government had told us to do, keep jobs in America, employ people, et cetera.
1:11:41
Alex Shuford III: And then when when it came down to it, they said, Yeah, you did too good a job, you have too many employees, no loans for you.
1:11:46
Alex Shuford III: So but we we figured it out.
1:11:48
Alex Shuford III: Um we kept the employees uh own uh the payroll, we you know, we did all those things that you kind of needed to do to retain your ability to reopen.
1:11:58
Alex Shuford III: You know, but it was tough.
1:11:59
Alex Shuford III: We we did salary cuts across all of our management team.
1:12:01
Alex Shuford III: Everybody shared in the pain.
1:12:03
Alex Shuford III: You know, and and and then when we reopened, it was, you know, it's difficult to get people back in the swing.
1:12:09
Alex Shuford III: Sometimes you don't know if the systems you turn back on are gonna run again.
1:12:13
Alex Shuford III: You know, that the compressor hadn't been shut down for 15 years.
1:12:16
Alex Shuford III: Will it start back up?
1:12:17
Alex Shuford III: Will that will that router run when we go to restart it up?
1:12:21
Alex Shuford III: You know, but the day before we were restarting all the factories.
1:12:25
Alex Shuford III: Um, and we were super excited, and we had all the management team together, and we read the the executive order on the requirements to restart.
1:12:33
Alex Shuford III: And one of them was that you had to take the temperature of everybody that came into your factory, a touch list temperature.
1:12:40
Alex Shuford III: And we said, geez, how many thermometers do we have?
1:12:43
Alex Shuford III: And we sent everybody out to count thermometers.
1:12:45
Alex Shuford III: We had like three touchless because no one had infrared thermometers.
1:12:49
Alex Shuford III: And we said, Oh, panic.
1:12:50
Alex Shuford III: You know, we have to have something like 29 thermometers to cover all the places our employees come in.
1:12:56
Alex Shuford III: So we were like, everybody go out and buy thermometers.
1:12:58
Alex Shuford III: And we're all on cell phones calling each other, and there were no touchless thermometers available at any pharmacy in a three-county area.
1:13:06
Alex Shuford III: We kept going further and further out, and I was just dejected.
1:13:10
Alex Shuford III: At the end of the day, it's whatever, 3:30.
1:13:12
Alex Shuford III: We can't find any thermometers, we're not going to be able to open because we can't take people's temperature.
1:13:17
Alex Shuford III: Is this really my life?
1:13:19
Alex Shuford III: And I'm standing in a Walmart and I'm looking in, I'm in the pharmacy and I'm looking out across the Walmart, just shaking my head, and I see against the far back wall, there's a children's department.
1:13:29
Alex Shuford III: And I was like, I wonder if they have thermometers in the children's department.
1:13:33
Alex Shuford III: And so I walk over to the kids and children department and I'm looking around, and next to this little display of like strollers, there's a little wall and it's got thermometers sitting there.
1:13:44
Tiffany Woolley: Oh god blood.
1:13:45
Alex Shuford III: They're sold out in the pharmacy, but no one thought to go to the baby section.
1:13:48
Alex Shuford III: And I bought all three of them they had, and I got on the cell phone and I called everybody.
1:13:53
Alex Shuford III: I said, go to the wall department, go to the kids' department.
1:13:56
Alex Shuford III: They've got thermometers.
1:13:58
Alex Shuford III: And we came back and everybody had arm, we poured them all out on the conference room table.
1:14:01
Alex Shuford III: We must have had 40 thermometers.
1:14:03
Alex Shuford III: And we were literally dancing in the boardroom.
1:14:06
Alex Shuford III: We were so excited that we were able to buy thermometers so that we could reopen the factory the next day.
1:14:11
Alex Shuford III: And I mean, we're high-fiving, and you would have thought we would have just won a Nobel Prize.
1:14:16
Alex Shuford III: But it's those, and like, and by the way, that sticks in my memory.
1:14:19
Alex Shuford III: That moment of collective, like uh a collective win.
1:14:23
Alex Shuford III: It was a small win, but it was fundamental, and it created a cultural moment.
1:14:29
Alex Shuford III: Like everyone wanted the same thing.
1:14:31
Alex Shuford III: Get our people back to work.
1:14:33
Alex Shuford III: They want to be back to work, we want them back to work.
1:14:35
Alex Shuford III: We're not going to be held up by a thermometer.
1:14:38
Tiffany Woolley: Well, I think that's a great way to wrap up because it means that Rock House Family Farm brands is in very good hands.
1:14:45
Alex Shuford III: Well, at least we have the ability to take a temperature.
1:14:48
Alex Shuford III: Yes.
1:14:49
Alex Shuford III: Thank you so much for having me.
1:14:50
Alex Shuford III: Appreciate the delight.
1:14:51
Alex Shuford III: Been a delight.
1:14:53
Alex Shuford III: Thank you.
1:14:54
Tiffany Woolley: Thank you.
1:14:56
Voice Over: iDesign Labs Podcast is an SW Group production in association with the five-star and TW interiors.
1:15:03
Voice Over: To learn more about iDesign Lab or TW Interiors, please visit TWInteriors.com.