DavidHendricks: Local furniture maker bucks outsourcing trend

San Antonio Express-News
In an age when U.S. furniture companies tend to shift manufacturing overseas to stay

competitive, a San Antonio furniture company operates its lone plant here and anticipates 10 percent to 15 percent revenue growth yearly.
It’s all a matter of whom you sell to, said KLN Steel Products Co. President Douglas Herber.
KLN, a 42-year-old, family-owned company, sells its products to college dormitories, the military and prisons.
These customers want custom-made specialty beds, desks, wardrobes, tables and other products that can be ordered, with new designs, with quick turnaround time.
“Most furniture companies make 10,000 of a product that looks one way,” Herber said. “Sixty percent of our business is similar-but-different orders. That allows us to do what we do and stay competitive.”
Sheets of steel and wood flow into KLN’s 185,000-square-foot plant at Two Winnco Drive. After the sheets are bent, molded and painted into more than 100,000 pieces of furniture a year, the products are shipped worldwide.
Shipping crates in the warehouse now are labeled for destinations including the Universities of Illinois and Oklahoma and the Marines’ Camps Lejeune and Pendleton.
Past customers have included the Universities of Texas at San Antonio and Austin, Arizona State, New Mexico State, Georgia Tech, Eastern Connecticut State, Western Connecticut State and Tarleton State.
KLN sells regularly to all military branches, including West Point. In addition to furnishing barracks at Fort Sam Houston and Lackland AFB, KLN has made beds used in U.S. military quarters in Iraq. Prison furniture is sold across the nation and even to the United Kingdom, to “Her Majesty’s prisons,” Herber said.
Employees proudly point out that their furniture was used in a prison scene in the 1996 Richard Gere movie “Primal Fear.”
KLN’s chairman and chief executive is David Ladensohn, whose family owns the company. Started by three families in 1964, KLN began in a plant at Perrin-Beitel Road and Loop 410. It moved in 1998 to larger facilities that had been the headquarters and distribution center for the Winn’s variety store chain along Interstate 35 near Binz-Engleman Road.
While members of the San Antonio Manufacturers Association recently toured the plant, Herber said KLN started by serving the college dorm market and later won most of its business from the military before rebounding into the college market.
Wood remains the primary ingredient for college dorm furniture. Dorm designers — taking cues from students — these days seek more steel in furnishings for a high-tech look. KLN’s ability to respond to this design trend has boosted orders in recent years, Herber said.
That translated into employment growth to 138 full-time workers now from 110 in 2003, Herber said. KLN also employs 50 to 80 temporary workers on a seasonal basis, and typically has 180 workers at any given time.
The plant’s steel-cutting operation occurs around the clock. The rest of the plant operates in a pair of 10-hour shifts Mondays to Thursdays, with Fridays and Saturdays added when necessary.
KLN commands only 1.5 percent to 2 percent of its market. Other small family-owned furniture manufacturers are its main competitors, Herber said. By staying flexible and ready to answer the custom-made market, Herber said, there’s no reason why KLN cannot maintain double-digit yearly growth for the foreseeable future.