A trip to Hancock & Moore's Factories

[drcollie]

Last week I was at Hancock & Moore for the day, and went to three different factories they operate (Main Plant, Frame Factory, and the Motion / Fabric plant). I took a lot of photos and spoke with a number of people. I decided to document my trip there, though likely this will be a thread that it may take me several days to add to, so come back and check it out occasionally to see if anything has been added.

The impetus for this trip all started with a sofa that arrived with leather that was too loose on the frame, it was a Harvest Tufted sofa. When I unpacked it, I said "this is not good" and I have never seen this occur before. I'll show you what happened because while some stores would NEVER post this for fear of damaging business, the fact is things happen in life and you have to take care of them. This is how the piece looked out of the box, leather is Cameo Burnished. Pretty bad, yes? I sent this photo to them at Hancock and Moore and they were literally horrified - and the customer for this piece was very upset because they had been waiting for it for some time. The normal course of action is to re-box the piece, re-ship it to H&M via a truck line, they correct it and ship it back to me. Total time appx 4 weeks to cycle it back. What had occured was this piece did not leave the factory like this, and it had absorbed the high humidity from being in a transport trailer to my store during a hot, steamy rainy period in North Carolina. I had never seen anything like this, nor had Hancock and Moore.



It was decided, partially because the customer was so upset, that H&M would send two upholstery techs from the factory to my store (6 1/2 hours drive), pull the cover off it, re-attach and it would take a day. However, as I took more and more detail photos of it and sent those to them, it because evident it needed to go back to the factory where all the department heads can look at it and they have the resources to do it one hundred percent. Now we are back to the 4 week turnaround. It's been twelve years since I was at the factory, and I had a customer (and forum member) who lived in Fayetteville NC that wanted to buy a floor model I had, so I decided to take my weekend and drive it down myself (Sunday / Monday) in my smaller of the two trucks, my Ford Transit. If I had it on the loading dock at 7 a.m. Monday morning, then they would have it ready to go by 3:30 p.m. that day, and I would tour the three plants while they were working on the sofa and spend the day with the Phil Brown, VP of Sales. This way I could have the sofa back to the customer immediately. So I cancelled my weekend plans and hit the road 6 a.m on Sunday morning. Plus I put my Mountain Bike in the van so I could do a little afternoon off-road riding on the trails with my buddy Fabian Gramer in Charlotte NC after the delivery of the floor stock piece that I made around lunch time.



I left the hotel 6:30 a.m. Monday morning to drive to the Main Plant in Taylorsville and arrived at 6:59 a.m. As I pulled into the factory I figured I would have to wander around ten minutes or so to find someone to help me unload and open the loading dock doors, that sort of thing.



Imagine my surprise to find every department head and two Vice Presidents of the company standing in the bay of the loading dock waiting for me to back up. Ten people in all. As soon as I put the truck in park I heard my back doors open and four men whisked that sofa out of the truck and put it on the dock before I could even get my door open. It was like a Fast Response Team and I could tell they were embarrassed by what they saw. These are hard-working people clearly proud of what they make and things like this are very, very rare. They said "We got this, you go with Phil and we'll have it ready this afternoon, we're going to strip it down to the bare frame." So Phil and I went off to the three plants, discussed the new Town and Country promotion coming out later this month and talked furniture for the next 8 hours. At 3:20 p.m. they had this sofa totally re-built from the ground up and between you and me - this piece was poured over so much its probably now as perfect as a sofa can be made. You could play the drums on the back of that sofa now, its so tight.



And this is the team that worked on it all day. The tallest gentleman on the far right is Lee Sherrill, he's THE Master Upholsterer in the factory and his wife works in the Customer Service Department. (Hancock and Moore is basically twenty-six families in the shops, most everyone is related). The most petite lady is the middle of the sofa is head of the burnishing department, she had to blend in all the hide when it was re-done. The lady of the far right does all the final touch-ups prior to shipping, I spent an hour with her learning touch-up tricks on wood and leather, she's very good at her job. As you can see, they are proud of their work.



I left H&M at 3:30 p.m. and got home at 11:30 p.m. Monday night (long day). We delivered the sofa back to the customer on Tuesday, the next day. I drove 1,004 miles it two days time. While you can't assure everything will be perfect every single time, what sets apart one dealer from another is the customer service, and my customer for this sofa did appreciate the extra effort i put in to take care of this for them, as well as H&M's willingness to basically drop everything and get this done in a day.

More on the actual tour next post in this series.