by Macy, Beth
He calls from his car—though he still isn’t sure what button to press if you call him on his cell.
He calls from his bed at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery. Still slurring from anesthesia after a foot operation, he’s thought of one more thing he wants to recount: The story of Apollo 13, the way those astronauts and the men in Houston worked night and day to fix the botched equipment so no one would die. The way they refused to accept failure and did not yield and Guess what, America! They prevailed because they worked hard and smart. And so can you!
He’s practically in tears when he calls after learning that more people at Stanley Furniture will soon lose their jobs. He prefaces the conversation with This is off the record, this is off o’ everything. This is just us girls.
He calls. And calls. And calls. Never identifies himself; never has to. With that deep baritone drawl and that entitled sense of timing, who else would it be?
He called Garet so often in the early days of getting the Sumter plant running—usually at 5:30 in the morning and again at 10:30 at night—that Garet’s wife finally grabbed the phone.
“Are you trying to cut Garet out of all his sex life?” Martha shouted.
John Bassett laughed so hard at that one, he actually gave Garet a night or two off. Still, his personal rule for the telephone is simple, comprehensive, and not open for discussion: “I don’t call Gentiles on Easter weekend or Jews on Yom Kippur.”
Any other time, when he feels the need to lecture or tell a dirty joke or describe an idea that has just occurred to him, he calls.
The design calls in Sumter were among the most colorful. The V-B/Williams beds came with mirrors glued to the headboards. Some were papered in fake marble. An entertainment center called Good Vibrations came with your choice of fake marble, fake wood, or mirrors, and it had compartments for a television and a stereo, as well as a rack for shot glasses and a bottle of, say, Courvoisier, like something from “The Ladies’ Man,” that old Saturday Night Live sketch.
One dresser was so wobbly that the plant manager had to put it on skis. “It was actually a shim, with two pieces of wood to make the dresser stable enough that it wouldn’t tip over, but it was just like a person wearing skis,” recalled Bob Merriman, Vaughan-Bassett’s longtime sales chief and a board member of V-B/Williams.
The Larry Mohs of the industry were now drilling the wood-furniture market, but John’s new Sumter plant could do an end run around them with a cheaper alternative to their solid wood and veneers. The marketing-friendly term was MDF, for “medium-density fiberboard.” It was also called borax. But critics still called it glit.
MDF was marketed as promotional furniture—in furniture-retail lingo, promotional refers to the cheapest items in a company’s line. It was sold, usually via credit, in low-end discount stores such as Heilig-Meyers. A V-B/Williams bedroom suite wholesaled for $300, which was about $300 less than the veneer-based products the company made in Galax and $700 less than the solid wood furniture coming out of its Elkin plant.
The target customer lived far away from places like Roaring Gap, but John saw promise in marketing low-priced furniture. Because it attracted an entirely different customer base than he was used to, John called his salespeople together to brainstorm. “We’ve got to sit down and figure out what the ethnics and the low-income people are buying, because that’s what we’ve got to sell,” he said.
They journeyed to stores in the middle of slums in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Harlem customers particularly loved the stuff. Buck Higgins, still the Vaughan-Bassett CEO, had never been to places like that before and had no intention of lingering. In one Los Angeles neighborhood, his rental car overheated, and he panicked. “My God, we’ll get killed down here in this barrio! They’ll take our pocketbooks and our shoes!”
Buck told John and Merriman to fetch water for the radiator, after which they sped out of there in a scene that still cracks Merriman up. “But you know what?” he said. “The more blue-collar they were, the better John got along with them. Besides, he’d been at [mass-market] Bassett for so long, it’s not like he expected to be dealing with Harvard graduates anyway.”
Garet Bosiger, reared on a Virginia tobacco farm that didn’t have running water till he was ten years old, was shocked the first time he went on one of the company’s design trips, as they were called. He went to Heilig-Meyers’s offices in Richmond with John’s son Wyatt, who had just joined the retailer, and stood back as a pompous buyer berated and belittled Wyatt for selling inferior furniture. More even-keeled than his father and Garet both, Wyatt said nothing—he’d worked for the man out of college and knew he enjoyed intimidating salesmen.
“I’d like to get that guy in a dark alley one night and teach him some manners,” Garet told John in Sumter after recounting the episode.
“You’re the dumbest guy I’ve ever talked to,” John shot back. “Don’t you know the best way to get revenge?”
“What’s that?”
“You take their money!”
Garet and I both grew up in houses where the furniture was bought used or picked up along the side of the road. We bonded over our past poverty one rainy fall day in 2012, and we cracked up as he recounted JBIII’s eccentricities and the social blunders he made courtesy of his silver-spoon upbringing. There was the time he bragged about the $100,000 he’d just made via a single phone call to his stockbroker. A recession loomed, but, as John said happily to Garet, “Thank God people are still buying cigarettes, Co’-Cola, and beer!”
Another time, John asked his plant manager how things were going at home. Garet told him that he and his wife were buying a house in Sumter and navigating the mortgage-application process.
“What interest rates are they offering?” John wanted to know.
“Nine percent.”
“Well, tell ’em you’re not gonna do it! Tell ’em you’re offering seven, and they can take it or leave it!”
Garet had to laugh. His boss understood the nuances of operating a business, from factory depreciation to EPA regulations to arcane tax codes. He read the Economist every week!
But he’d never taken out a mortgage in his life.
John related remarkably well to most of the four hundred line workers in Sumter, a predominantly black workforce that had been unionized during the Williams tenure. He’d had a chance to buy the plant a few years before Turner bought it, but he hadn’t wanted the hassle or added expense of the union. Sumter wages were 10 percent lower than Galax wages, which were already 5 percent below the industry average. And by closing the plant the year before, Turner had done JBIII the huge favor of eliminating the union presence.
Now unemployment was rising, and people were eager to get to work. “He was very adamant with the workers that if the union ever came back in, he would shut the plant down,” Sumter controller Ellen Hill recalled. “If they had a problem, they were supposed to come tell him; the line of communication was always open.”
We can help you better than some union organizer “who lives off in Timbuktu,” he told them. If a worker or manager had any problem at all, he wanted to know about it before it reached critical mass. “Come on, guys, at least bring me a live body to revive!” he told them. “Don’t bring me a corpse!”
He presented himself casually to the workers, wearing his trademark sweat-stained golf cap, khakis, and a tattered sweater vest (usually embroidered with the logo of one of his exclusive golf clubs). His clothes were not showy—half blue-blood prep and half cheapskate. By the end of the day, they were usually layered with sawdust, as if he’d stepped out of an Orvis catalog from twenty years back and had yet to locate a shower or washing machine.
“He never wore a suit and tie, and you got the sense he never exploited his position,” said Sumter maintenance man Roger Plock. “But people knew he was the boss.”
A month after V-B/Williams premiered its first line, the backlog for orders was so long they had to take the line off the market for a while. “Th
e one thing about glit?” Merriman said. “It may have been tacky as hell, but it was profitable.”
By the time John sold V-B/Williams to Vaughan-Bassett and merged the two companies together, in 1998, the Sumter plant was valued at $33 million. Not bad for wobbly beds and mirrors held together by glue and you know what.
With Sumter up and running, John began spending most of his time in Galax. Buck Higgins was about to retire, so Pat and John could finally stretch their wings. At the High Point Market, Pat Bassett wined and dined retailers in a house the company rented during the semiannual show, and orders swelled. A talented cook who spared neither expense nor butter—one signature dish was deep-fried chicken Kiev—Pat was deemed by John to be the Perle Mesta of Roaring Gap, just as Jane had nicknamed herself in Bassett. He even hung up signs that said PERLE’S PLACE in their house.
Pat carefully assembled each night’s guest list to avoid conflicts among competing buyers. She hired professional chefs to help her cater and made sure no glass went unfilled. The parties occasionally got so wild that she had a Breathalyzer on hand to test people before they left. Not many passed.
“We were a little company, probably the least expected to survive,” John said. “So we did anything we could think of to entice customers.” Between Pat and Sumter and all that bird-dogging John did inside the factories and out on the road, Vaughan-Bassett sales had nearly quadrupled, to $79 million, five years after his arrival.
But it was the Sumter plant turnaround more than any of the others that buoyed him. “I realized I was J.D. Bassett’s grandson and Doug Bassett’s son. And I was even Bob Spilman’s brother-in-law. But guess what? This time, I did it. And that creates confidence that you’re just as good as the next guy out there.”
Duke Taylor had Vaughan-Bassett humming, and Bob Merriman had permission to go after the best salesmen in the industry. The guys at Bassett were unhappy, Merriman recalled. “Working for Bassett had always been like being in the FBI. You had to do it their way.” He contacted every one of them, chicken-picking his way through Bassett’s reps in Chicago, New York, and California.
Over drinks that Christmas, Spilman gave John hell for poaching his salesmen, telling him, “I’ve got to figure out a way to keep you and Bob Merriman from pissing in my tent. Y’all are hiring too many of my people.”
To which John responded, “They came to us.”
That was true, but only in a hairsplitting way. The two men had poached so many of each other’s employees—hiding at least one of them in the woods!—that people in the industry had long since stopped keeping count.
Of graver concern, had anyone been paying attention, were the latest sets of containers trickling in from China. They held solid wood furniture that was about to retail, astonishingly, for the same low price as the glit.
On December 8, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law. The trade pact would eliminate virtually all tariffs and trade restrictions among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. As he signed it, Clinton said he hoped the agreement would encourage other countries to work toward a broader world. In Mexico, NAFTA was greeted with a mixture of excitement and dread. Some Mexican businessmen worried about the end of the traditional siesta, as the hard-charging, American-style business pace threatened to put a dent in two-hour lunches and naps.
But as discussions about trade deals between NAFTA partners and China began to grab headlines, no one brought up the Asian work culture or the pace. In a 1994 Gallup poll, 68 percent of the Chinese population said that “work hard and get rich” was their overarching personal philosophy of life.
JBIII knew all about what Larry Moh had accomplished in Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. He followed the progress when Moh made his strategic opening salvo in China, in a coastal area outside Beijing called Tianjin.
“When Larry went into China, he had really done his homework,” the industry analyst Jerry Epperson said. He began by sending letters of introduction to the head of the Communist Party in that particular province. He followed up by sending formal letters of reference and bank statements to show that he wasn’t just talking—he had money to invest.
Then, following the custom in China, Moh made a sustained show of sincerity and purpose. For three consecutive weeks, Moh arrived for a Monday appointment with the Communist Party official—only to sit in the waiting room for days at a stretch. “As a foreign investor back then in China, you had to get all these different permits,” recalled Larry Moh’s son, Michael. “You had to meet with many different mayors and secretaries and explain, over and over, how you’re going to improve the economy in that particular locale.”
Moh understood that he couldn’t send an underling to wait there. It had to be the senior-most person in the business. He also knew that his factories would have to be situated facing a certain direction. Feng shui, the belief that positioning objects can affect energy flow, remains popular in this superstition-rich country, and Moh himself was a believer. Likewise, to maximize good luck and fortune, the factory had to open on a carefully chosen date.
Moh also knew that China needed people like him as much as he needed its workforce. The Chinese government realized it had to globalize in order to improve the standard of living among its masses. It didn’t want Westernization so much as restoration of the party’s legitimacy after Mao, and that could be achieved through economic growth. Any Western culture that seeped in was purely incidental, aggressively discouraged, and occasionally snuffed out. China was still a decade away from formally joining the World Trade Organization, and the entrepreneurialism during Moh’s ascent became so unrestrained that observers the world over called it cowboy capitalism.
The underlying strategy was not so different from the one in Bassett, Virginia, circa 1902: cheap labor, efficient production, and minimal government interference. Laurence Zung, Moh’s brother-in-law and business partner, remembered the two of them slicing through boiler permits in Singapore, ignoring permits for sawmilling rubber trees in Malaysia—“Before they even find out we’re in there cutting, we’re already gone,” he said, chuckling—and breezily renegotiating land contracts in Taiwan.
“In the Oriental custom,” Zung said, “when people know each other and trust each other, things go so much faster” than in the more strictly regulated United States. “Larry is very good at mingling with people, and the thing I admire most about him? He has guts. He will do a lot of things which I doubt I will ever try to do on my own.” (Though Moh died in 2002, his brother-in-law still speaks of him in the present tense.)
The gutsiest thing he did, in Zung’s opinion, was figure out how to skip the American manufacturers entirely and sell directly to retailers, a strategy that threatened to make the very existence of the American manufacturers moot. But it involved taking some belly-churning financial risks.
Previously, when the company sold furniture to American manufacturers, it was paid the moment the merchandise was placed in the shipping container. With Moh’s new scheme, the money would not be transferred until the merchandise arrived in America, and Zung was nervous about funding the enterprise during the three to four months it would take to ship, assemble, and place the items in U.S. stores. But Moh had a hunch that bigger profits awaited if they brought in an investor and changed everything up. He found a sugar daddy in the Matson Navigation Company, an American shipping concern with substantial holdings in Hawaiian sugar plantations and an eagerness to invest in the Far East. (The company was launched in 1882, when Captain William Matson sailed his three-masted schooner from San Francisco to Hilo, Hawaii, carrying merchandise and food supplies.) “To really make it big, we had to get the money to finance our inventory,” Zung told me. After seven years, Zung and Moh bought their shares back from Alexander and Baldwin, Matson’s parent company, then took the company public.
By the time he sold Universal to Masco in 1989 for $480 million, Moh was a master of globalization. He had four factories in Taiwan; two plants each in China, Singapore, and Malaysia; an
d one each in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Indonesia. The company also maintained assembly, sales, and marketing offices in Sweden, Saudi Arabia, and Australia.
“I don’t know how he did it, but he always had bright guys working for him here and offshore, and he was somehow able to keep them all from cannibalizing each other,” said author and industry watcher Michael Dugan.
One of Moh’s acquisitions was BenchCraft, based in New Albany, Mississippi, which owner Hugh McLarty had sold to him in 1987. At that time, Universal was busy acquiring American case goods and upholstery companies alike, many of them based in North Carolina. “Mr. Moh was a man of few words,” McLarty said. “He never explained why he did things; he just did what he wanted to do and didn’t talk about it much. But he was very respected in the industry, very smart. He knew to grease palms when he needed to.
“People understood,” McLarty said. “China was out to run them out of business.”
Moh was decisive, focused, and not at all afraid. Colleagues recalled him leading meetings while keeping track of his considerable American stock holdings on a television—out of the corner of his eye. “He made ninety-seven million dollars one day in a single trade,” said Richard Bennington, a High Point University professor who regularly courted Moh as a donor for the college’s home-furnishings program.
But Moh didn’t brag about his money, or his achievements. Moh endowed generous scholarships in his wife’s name at both High Point and Wharton, his graduate-school alma mater. When Bennington asked him to contribute $50,000 to help the college raise the $500,000 needed to construct a new furniture-program building, Moh gifted the entire amount. “He didn’t want anything named for him,” Bennington said, adding that Moh had the building named for the editor of Furniture/Today.
“He was a very fierce competitor, but he was very humble about it and very quiet, which is why you won’t find much written about him.”
