Trailblazer by Farooq Kathwari

Author:Farooq Kathwari
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626346468
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Published: 2019-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

I heard the concerns, and I understood them. In fact, one of my goals was to enhance the importance of our designers—to empower them and make them even more valuable members of the Ethan Allen team.

To begin making this happen, in 1986 we hosted an all-expense-paid trip by some six hundred Ethan Allen designers from across North America to attend a summit meeting at our headquarters in Connecticut—the first such meeting we’d ever held. Many of these designers had worked with our dealers for decades. Now they had their first opportunity to see a designer-curated gallery filled with nothing but Ethan Allen products, and they liked what they saw. As a result, they embraced our plan to develop a unified and distinctive Ethan Allen style based on a consistent array of company-wide products. Many went home and served as effective ambassadors on behalf of the plan, winning the support of dealers who’d previously been dubious about it.

The summit meeting also gave us an opportunity to greatly improve our training of designers. Previously, most of our training was limited to presentations by our field representatives who would visit local stores to offer product knowledge and a smattering of design ideas. These were supplemented by occasional regional sessions. Now we brought together designers from around the country to attend training sessions by top experts, to learn about current trends in color, texture, and style, and to offer feedback to our headquarters team about product ideas. We called this “Ethan Allen College.” The level of professionalism and creativity of Ethan Allen designers sharply increased as a result of these new training opportunities.

We’ve held our designers’ summit every year since 1986, and it remains an enormously popular event. We provide the designers with news about the latest product and style ideas coming out of Ethan Allen, and we gather their feedback and suggestions about concepts we can develop in the near future. We also recognize and honor designers who’ve achieved the most for their customers during an evening of Academy Award–style presentations. Nurturing and tapping the creativity of our designers is one of the best ways we’ve discovered to ensure that we’re creating products that speak directly to the interests of our customers as well as millions of potential customers whom we hope to attract.

My interest in building a sense of teamwork and shared purpose didn’t stop with our designers. At a business meeting in Danbury, I’d met a journalist named Judith Cutright. I asked her to join Ethan Allen to develop a quarterly video communication program for us to share with our network. The videos were shown at our manufacturing plants and at our dealer stores.

One day when I was visiting our plant at Beecher Falls, Vermont, an associate got my attention. “I saw the video showing how you invited six hundred designers to visit the Danbury headquarters,” he said. “It’s a great idea. But why not include the factory workers too?”

I liked the idea. So I invited five thousand rank-and-file team members

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