Some big office furniture dealers have tapped Fullerton-based Valentine Wood-works for their manufacturing.
The company generates $5 million in yearly sales making desks, conference tables, cubicles and other office items for dealers including Santa Fe Springs-based Tangram Interiors, dTank Inc. of Sun Valley, Irvine-based Systems Source Inc. and others.
Valentine Woodworks’ furniture can be found at the University of Cali- fornia, Irvine, Viacom Inc.’s MTV studios, Lake Forest-based Sole Tech-nology Inc. and Pasa-dena’s eHarmony.com Inc., to name a few.
Having a track record helps win contracts, founder Ben Valentine said.
“It helps you get your foot in the door,” he said.
Valentine started his company in 1989 after working in the furniture industry for a few years.
He studied to be an architect at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, but departed to pursue his passion for office furniture, which was something that he had cultivated at an early age from the influence of his great uncle Harlan Moore.
Moore designed furniture for Zeeland, Mich.-based Herman Miller Inc., one of the original makers of office furniture.
Pictures of Moore cradling baby Valentine while sitting in a Herman Miller reclining office chair decorate Valentine Woodworks’ office space, as do original antique Herman Miller pieces.
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Valentine Woodworks plant: company generates $5 million a year |
At 21, while working at an office furniture company, Valentine said he realized that he wanted to be his own boss.
He started his company out of his 400-square-foot garage in Silverado Canyon with a $2,000 budget.
His na & #271;vet & #233; helped soften the harsh realities that come with starting a business, such as budgeting company money and finding clients, he said.
“I was young and dumb,” Valentine said.
Valentine Woodworks started off with one client and took jobs making furniture for small businesses.
Valentine did all of the work himself his first year in business and started hiring workers in 1990, he said.
Eventually the company outgrew Valen-tine’s garage and moved into a 12,000-square-foot building in Huntington Beach.
About two years ago, the company outgrew its Huntington Beach headquarters and needed to find a building that would be affordable but big enough to handle the company’s future growth, Valentine said.
Rather than buying a 20,000-square-foot building that the company eventually would outgrow in a few years, the company decided to buy a 50,000-square-foot building in a nondescript office park in Fullerton that it could grow into.
The new building was expensive. Valentine is mum on how much the company had to spend.
“We figured we would save money in the long run since it costs so much money to move from building to building,” he said.
Valentine Woodworks counts 30 workers at its headquarters and about $13 million worth of equipment used to cut, shape, coat and attach pieces of furniture. His designs are made out of wood, recyclable materials such as bamboo and wheat grass, plastic and other materials.
Office furniture dealers tap Valentine to make pieces according to their design specifications.
Once made, the furniture is picked up by third-party carriers and shipped to offices, schools and other locations where they are installed by the dealers.
The office furniture business is hurting these days as the economy holds companies back from leasing office space and decorating with new furniture, Valentine said.
“It’s a tough time in our industry with a down economy and the price of everything going up,” he said.
The company plans to get through this year’s downturn by investing in better technology that will help make production more efficient, Valentine said.
Equipment isn’t cheap but it lasts for years, he said.
A piece of machinery can cost more than $1 million, he said.
“We invest a lot of money in equipment,” Valentine said. “It’s a necessary expense.”
Valentine Woodworks plans to do some private label manufacturing for other companies.
These days, the company is seeing a lot of work coming from large manufacturers that are cutting production jobs and outsourcing work to smaller factories in order to keep their overhead costs lower, Valentine said.
Game Gear
Wireless Emporium Inc. is getting into games.
The Fullerton-based company, which generates about $4 million a year selling cell phones and accessories through its Web sites, is starting a site called fatgamer.com to sell video game consoles, video games and accessories for Nintendo Co.’s Wii, Sony Corp.’s PlayStation3 and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360.
“We want it to be the go-to place for gamers,” cofounder Eugene Ku said.
Ku and cofounder Tony Lee are using Fatgamer.com to tap into the booming computer and video game industry, which generated about $9.5 billion in 2007, according to the Entertainment Software Association of Washington, D.C.
Fatgamer.com will follow the same model as Wireless Emporium’s and other Web sites by selling products at discounted prices and shipping them for free.
The site also will offer blogs, news and reviews for game aficionados that want to reach out to other gamers, Lee said.
Ku and Lee, who are of Korean heritage, started Wireless Emporium in 2001 out of a spare bedroom in Ku’s apartment.
Fresh out of college, the partners tapped their Web developer friends to build a site for a few hundred dollars.
The company now employs some 15 workers at its 7,000-square-foot headquarters where it warehouses cell phones, faceplates, Bluetooth headsets and other products that it buys directly from local vendors and manufacturers.
Wireless Emporium said it would keep its niche in the retail business as a discount seller in order to maintain loyal customers.
“The retail industry is definitely struggling right now, but we can’t raise our prices because that would drive away our loyal customers,” Lee said.
The company still is generating business despite difficulties in the market, Ku said.
Wireless Emporium has outgrown its headquarters and could lease another building in the Fullerton area for extra warehouse space, he said.
Chic Baby Tees
Irvine-based Punky Mae LLC makes high-end message T-shirts for little kids.
Punky Mae’s shirts are made with 100% cotton and embroidered with slogans such as “Play Nice,” “Kindergarten Rocks” and “A Timeout is in My Future.”
They come in different colors with three-quarter and half-sleeves and can be worn by girls and boys ages 2 through 6.
The shirts are sold directly to 50 boutiques and Internet stores including Bella and Max in a Seattle suburb, maddyroseboutique.com and Little Threads in Chicago.
They sell for about $32.
The company has already dressed some celebrities.
The Gosselin sextuplets from the reality television show “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” on TLC wear Punky Mae.
The privately held company doesn’t disclose revenue and counts two employees.
Former models Laurie Canevaro and Jen Pestano started Punky Mae earlier this year after noticing an overlooked market for high-end baby T-shirts with messages that are stitched on rather than printed.
“We saw a need for message tees that wouldn’t fade after you wash them,” Canevaro said. “The quality just wasn’t out there in the market.”
Canevaro and Pestano pooled some money together and tapped a factory in China to manufacture the T-shirts, which they design themselves.
The designers made several cold calls to boutiques before getting their shirts into stores.
The partners aren’t worried about a downturn in the economy.
“We go after the moms that like to shop at the high-end boutiques. Those people are still shopping at the upscale stores,” Canevaro said.
