Let's get the Amish questions out of the way. First, Ernie Hershberger does use electricity for his business.
He will use a phone or fax machine, but so far doesn't need a computer to run his 30-employee furniture manufacturing facility and retail store, Homestead Furniture. He has a Web site (designed and maintained by a third party) from which you can order, but there's no phone in the showroom or warehouse.
His furniture isn't delivered by horse and buggy, but by trucks and commercial shipping services. Hershberger will ride in the trucks, but he can't drive them.
Homestead Furniture does accept credit cards, but its Holmes County store is closed on Sundays.
Due to the high tourist traffic in the area, Hershberger is used to the curiosity about the lifestyle he and his co-workers lead, and has even found it to be a strong selling point for some buyers.
"We don't get tired of the questions because we understand the interest," he says. "The way we look at it is if we would go overseas to Denmark or Amsterdam, over there it's a distinct, different lifestyle. So we would have the questions, too."
Yes, Hershberger is Amish, but his rapidly growing business in the heart of Ohio's largest Amish community in the Holmes, Wayne and Tuscarawas counties does ship its handcrafted, custom furniture around the world. And it's only going to get bigger.
The 38-year-old father of seven children, with the help of a non-Amish, or "English," marketing consultant, is rolling out a brand for his furniture called Abner Henry, which will be built not only at his Mount Hope headquarters, but also by Amish and non-Amish craftsmen around the region.
"We don't know anybody who's doing it on the level that we're doing it," says Hershberger. "There might be some hardwood furniture manufacturers left in the United States, but the customization is where we totally differentiate ourselves."
One step inside Homestead Furniture's 27,000-square-foot showroom and one's assumptions about "Amish furniture" disappear.
You will have to search hard to find any country-style, blond-oak chairs, tables and bookcases. You'll more likely spot items like a $15,000 dark-cherry leather-upholstered sleigh bed (one of which Hershberger just sold to an Atlanta business tycoon). You'll see a $7,000 multi-leaved dining table or a $10,000 executive office suite. You'll see Swedish design influences, entertainment systems configured to suit large, flat-screen high-definition televisions, and a 30-foot walnut corporate conference table with a company logo hand carved in the center and filled with Corian. No rustic wagon wheel coffee tables here — unless that's what the customer wants.
"We basically build whatever the customer asks for," says the energetic and cheerful Hershberger, who sports the traditional Amish bowl-style haircut and a beard that lines only his jawline. "Not saying ‘no' is what generated a lot of Homestead sales."
After talking with Hershberger for only a few moments, you forget that you're speaking to a person who belongs to a society whose chosen 19th-century lifestyle is so different from most Americans'. He runs his business like any entrepreneur, believing in the same principles of quality products and customer service. But Hershberger, perhaps due to his low-tech home life, seems happier and genuinely less stressed than most entrepreneurs would be when launching a local furniture business worldwide. He smiles often, laughs, cracks jokes and exudes a rare calmness despite his demands and responsibilities.
"It's not a big operation," he says of his 18-year-old manufacturing and retail business. "But it's enough to have a lot of fun."
Homestead Furniture was founded October 1990 in a 4,000-square-foot converted chicken coop owned by the family of Hershberger's future wife, Barbara, who had been in the quilting, shoe and horse harness business. He recalls the moment when he first heard about the venture. He was picking her up for a date on a Friday night and saw her family renovating the building.
"I thought, ‘You guys are nuts,'" he says. "It'll never work."
At the time, Hershberger worked at a nearby custom cabinet shop, which had been a family business for 90 years. After he and Barbara were married, he started working at Homestead part time, while still working at the custom cabinet shop as a production manager. He switched to Homestead full time in 2000.
Like most other furniture companies, Homestead offers collections with evocative names such as Millennium, Jacob's Creek or Ventura, but whether it's for the bedroom, office or living room, all the pieces are hardwood — no veneers or plywood — and customized by the customer, a rarity due to increased overseas manufacturing.
The furniture, which is assembled in Homestead's 24,000-square-foot manufacturing facility across the street from its showroom, is built using a cell-manufacturing technique in which the tools needed by the craftsman are nearby, allowing him to start and complete the building process in one area. It's the same process one would see in the Toyota Motor Co. plant in Lexington, Ky., which Hershberger has visited, as well as a Ford Motor Co. plant in Dearborn, Mich.
"I pretty well understand the Japanese Kaizen production system," Hershberger says. "If there's anything I really love on the business end, it's to get into [the manufacturing processes]. … It's actually a lot of fun. Once it gets into your blood, it's dangerous."
With only an eighth-grade formal education, Hershberger has a self-taught business degree through experience and voracious reading. As a boy, during summer breaks from school he would borrow a dozen books from the bookmobile and finish them in two weeks.
His love of reading continues as witnessed by his office, which is packed with strategy manuals and biographies by former and current CEOs from corporations such as IBM, General Motors, General Electric, Ford and Coca-Cola.
"If I could make a living reading books, I would," he says. "Just nonfiction. I don't waste my time on novels."
espite no advertising or Web site in the early days, word of the furniture store spread quickly, Hershberger says. In 1999, Homestead moved from the chicken coop to its current location, a newly constructed two-floor showroom with a 25-foot walnut staircase built in-house by Homestead's craftsmen.
A born salesman, Hershberger wanted to publicize the new store's opening and contacted Bruce Stambaugh, a marketing director at Walnut Hills Retirement Community and former principal of Winesburg Elementary School, the primary school Barbara Hershberger attended. Stambaugh, who also writes a newspaper column for the Holmes County Daily Record, was asked to write a press release, which he agreed to do. He's been the company's marketing director ever since.
"It's my second career and it's just been marvelous," says Stambaugh, who helped design the company's Web site and promotional materials. "You can talk to every employee and they'll say the same thing. They thrive off Ernie's energy."
Shortly after Stambaugh was brought on, he and Hershberger began formulating the Abner Henry strategy. Abner, the name of Hershberger's great-grandfather, and Henry, his father, will serve as the brand for a line of upscale furniture manufactured with Homestead's strict standards by Hershberger's employees, as well as other Amish and non-Amish craftsmen in the region. The goal is to not only grow business, but also to help the local economy.
"This local community has been hit hard," says Hershberger. "So we've taken Abner Henry out there as a marketing company. We want to create that brand name, ship it across the world and revive some of the business we've lost."
What's more, the craftsmen will use green practices throughout the manufacturing process as established by the Sustainable Furniture Council. Wood scraps are recycled into mulch. Sawdust becomes bedding for livestock. Heat from the diesel engine that runs the production tools is recycled into radiant heat for warming the manufacturing woodshop. Air in the finish room is exchanged every minute and runs through three filters before being released.
"Abner Henry is bigger than Ernie; it's bigger than Homestead," Stambaugh says. "It is part of the community. It has the opportunity to have other skilled craftsmen to supply this furniture to people who want the furniture and didn't know about us before."
Hershberger won't put a number on how much Abner Henry furniture he wants to sell this year, but if the history of Homestead's growth is any indicator, there will be a demand. Not that Hershberger would take any credit for the growth.
"I want to place the honor where it belongs, to the Man upstairs and also to the team here, which I can't talk enough about," he says. "I couldn't have dreamed of this, so I'm very thankful for the way it went."
(
lewis@inside-business.com)