Mixing Woods: Tiger Maple & Stained Cherry?

[drcollie]

Eldred Wheeler used to have a very nice business going for themselves, and the product they made in the late 70's and up until the early 90's was good stuff. That was back when Bill Wheeler and Emmett Eldred were there, before it was sold to Chartwell Corporation around 1992. There was a good demand for the product, they had good craftsmen working there and about 60 dealers, of which I was one.

Eldred Wheeler was totally committed to the 'run system'. That meant if they were going to do a run of Highboys, they would ONLY make them in batches of say...22 units, because thats' where Emmett figured out was necessary to make margin. There are two serious problems with this approach however. One is the wait time until there are 22 Flat Top Highboys to build. If dealers didn't order them fast enough, then customers would have to wait - sometimes for a year. Dealers would complain, because customers were putting the pressure on for their items. So Eldred Wheeler would then decide to build when they had orders for say.... 14 units, and then spec build the other 8. They were still going to build 22, even if not sold. While the pieces were going through the shop, maybe they sold another 2 units, leaving them with 6 for inventory. What did they do with the 6 leftovers? They opened two company stores and 'dumped' them at wholesale prices to the public as fast as they could. This made all the dealers nuts, because customers were savvy enough to shop around for a price (even in those pre-internet days) and EW refused to change their ways, even after a huge dealer meeting was organized by us dealers and we confronted them with it. It makes a store look bad when customers could buy direct for much less, so all the dealership base evaporated within a year. They were also not above taking a sale direct in your dealer territory instead of referring it to the dealer. Many times their company truck was delivering furniture to folks within a few miles of my store.

Between the wait time, and undercutting its dealers, Eldred Wheeler shot itself in the foot .

What really broke my back with them ( I was one of the last dealers to quit them, I hung in there a long time), was the Summer Pencil Post Bed sale in the mid-1990s. They put tiger maple pencil posts beds ON SALE to drum up some business and it was a great price. I took orders for almost forty beds as I recall, with promise dates of 90 days from Eldred Wheeler. Well, 90 days turned into six months, then a year. Every time I would call on behalf of an irate customer I would be told "We're getting ready to start the run, be ready in 6 weeks". These were out and out lies. What happened was they sold these beds so cheap, they could not buy the tiger maple for the beds at that price from any mill. I know because they were calling all around the country looking for 10/4 tiger maple in lengths (for the posts) at under $ 5 a board foot and no supplier had the wood for that cheap. Another year passed. Two years after the sale we still had no beds. By now I had lost customers over this and had to refund deposits. Customers were not mad at Eldred Wheeler, they were angry with me and accused me of lying to them. I didn't like that much, and became quite upset with the folks at Wheeler. FINALLY....two and a half years after the sale they delivered the beds. We opened the boxes up and after all that time, there was no tiger in the posts. Just a wisp of stripe. They never could find the cheap lumber they needed so they made them out of what was essentially plain maple with a small amount of figure. Now the customers that had hung in there were REALLY angry, and I can't say I blamed them. I quit Eldred Wheeler after the bed fiasco, tired of their ways and them costing me customers. There were other suppliers.

EW didn't mind, they figured they would just open their own retail stores and have top to bottom integration. What they didn't count on though, was the cost of operating those stores. They were used to a production business, not retailing. They lost exposure in all the major markets and never had the money to open up their own stores in all the markets they used to be present in. Those 60 dealers moved to other similar shops like DR Dimes or JL Treharn, who did not sell direct to the public and delivered product as it was ordered. EW went from a national entity to a regional one, and stories of customers having to wait well beyond promise times were legion and continued just as they had in the past.

Chartwell went bust in the mid-90's and the business was sold to Dave McCarthy. He held onto it for a few years and around 2002 or so it was sold to a couple of dot.bomb guys who had no clue what they were doing and confused their love of the form with running a production facility , and they bankrupt the business in 2008. Everything was sold at auction, including the name. A mill shop bought the rights to the name and gave it a go in 2008/09, but it failed there as well. Dave McCarthy bought the name back from the mill shop about the same time that LeFort was failing. All of LeForts equipment was placed for sale at auction but the auction was pulled just two weeks before it was scheduled to go and McCarthy and LeFort joined forces to try to build both lines from the one small location. And that's where it is today. Emmett Eldred's photo is on the website, but its my understanding thats about the total sum of his involvement with the company today.

Eldred Wheeler is a classic case of how to take a great company at startup, with a fantastic product and good design - and then totally run it into the ground with poor management and policies. If you come across EW built in the late 70s and all through the 80s' its worth getting, that was back when the shop was small and they put out some brilliant pieces. After 1992 though it was (in my opinion) hit or miss.

[organic_smallhome]

Wow. Fascinating story. Thanks for sharing it, Duane.

As it turns out, my husband thinks this EW table is too large for our living room, and I think he's probably right, so we won't be getting it, after all. Think I'll save my pennies and just buy the smaller Treharn version from you, instead.