Factory man
Describes how the chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture fought for his more than seven hundred employees in a small Virginia town using legal maneuvers, factory efficiencies, and his wits and determination in the wake of sales losses to cheap Asian furniture imports.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
4people
2014–2020years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The article alludes to, but doesn't expand on, the US's lost lead in furniture manufacturing. For more on this fascinating story, I recommend Beth Macy's "Factory Man" [0], the story of the systematic destruction of the North Carolina and Virginia-based wooden furniture industry by Chinese imports.
It's the exact same playbook as Huawei -- govt-backed "dumping" of loss-priced goods in an attempt for total market dominance. And US companies have historically been way too willing to expose trade secrets to Chinese manufacturers in exchange for temporarily cheaper supplies -- a Faustian bargain.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Factory-Man-Furniture-Offshoring-Amer...
- In that case it might be worth reading Factory Man, which is a somewhat biography of John D. Bassett III, third generation owner of Bassett furniture.
Completely fascinating history of the home furnishings industry and how globalization completely upended it.
- Somewhat related, I read the book "Factory Man" [1] probably five years ago now. It's a story of a guy who came from a big furniture producing family that had several factory towns in Virginia I believe.
Anyway, talks about how they got started out in the late 1800s and how starting in the 1980s things started getting cheaper and cheaper and then started getting moved to China for manufacture.
Then it gets into how this guy worked to actually keep the company he inherited up and running in the US.
Was pre-2016, but the book definitely had undertones of all the big "culture" stories that went around that election.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18774017-factory-man
- For those of you who may have trouble viewing this, I hacked together a little Selenium script to scrape this for you[1].
[1] https://gist.github.com/anonymous/84449fe7860e292e904f
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