Maine brand has loyal following Moosehead furniture to mark 55th year in people’s lives

It isn’t visible unless the light hits it just right. Like a watermark on fine stationery, the corporate seal of Moosehead Manufacturing appears atop the maple’s grain.

The Moosehead insignia is familiar to many Maine people. Furniture is important to families, said John Wentworth, third-generation president of Moosehead Manufacturing. Families surround a table for meals, then afterward parents sit in the same chairs with their children to help them with their homework. If there’s a nick in the wood, a scratch from a pen, chances are that even after 20 years, everyone in the family remembers how they got there.

It’s the parents who teach their children that when shopping for furniture to look for the dove-tail-shaped locks that join the pieces of wood. And to look for the Moosehead Manufacturing seal.

Moosehead Manufacturing next week is celebrating 55 years of producing family heirlooms, primarily adult, youth and infant bedroom sets, and dining room tables and chairs. In Maine, the old-fashioned colonial styles produced years ago are more familiar than the newer American country or Shaker designs selling throughout the United States. It may be a Maine habit to look for the Moosehead seal, but the company’s $15 million in annual sales primarily are generated beyond the state’s borders, said Russ Page, sales and marketing manager.

Moosehead Manufacturing, which employs 245 people, continues to operate in Piscataquis County even though it receives invitations weekly from other states that want the two-plant firm to move south. The personalized requests include offers of a manufacturing site built to Moosehead’s specifications, tax abatements for 10 years or more and energy costs half of that charged in Maine, Wentworth said.

The offers are tempting – and they have been seriously considered. Maine’s business climate isn’t friendly, with high taxes and high workers’ comp, energy and insurance costs, he said.

But none of the workers would follow if the company decided to move, Wentworth said, and they shouldn’t have to make that choice. Besides the company being under third-generation ownership, generations of workers have been producing the furniture, he said.

“We all grew up together – our kids go to school together, we go to the same post office,” Wentworth said. “It’s not all about money.”

Moosehead Manufacturing was founded in 1947 by John and Tolford Durham, two brothers who saw value in the birch, maple and ash trees that blanket central Maine. They established relationships with paper manufacturers to share the trees – Moosehead Manufacturing would get the logs, and the papermakers would use the limbs and other smaller remnants to produce pulp.

“We wouldn’t be here without them,” said Page of the paper companies. “John’s grandfather [John Durham] used to pride himself on using every piece of a tree.”

Wentworth said it surprises him that other furniture manufacturers are not finding the same value in Maine’s trees, which are suitable for low- and medium-priced furniture but too soft for higher-quality, harder wood pieces. Most furniture producers are in business-friendly states such as North Carolina or Virginia, he said, and economic developers in those two states have asked Moosehead Manufacturing to move there.

“It’s unfortunate that Maine, one of the largest forest products states, is not a furniture hub,” Wentworth said.

But Moosehead Manufacturing prefers to maintain its independence, with plants in Monson and Dover-Foxcroft instead of an oversized industrial park. And independent dealers, not major chains, sell its furniture lines.

In the past, Moosehead Manufacturing tried to get its products sold by the furniture conglomerates, but those relationships soured when the company was told it wouldn’t have control over its product lines, Page said.

“They have a tendency, as we found out, to begin to tell you how to run your business, and what product you’re going to make and how you’re going to make it,” he said.

Moosehead Manufacturing has partnered with two Canadian furniture producers to distribute their lines in the United States and Moosehead’s lines in Canada. Moosehead’s products also are sold in Bermuda, Panama, Puerto Rico, Japan and South Korea. The partners are Temple Stuart of Waterloo, Quebec, and Sawcreek of Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Retailers, Page said, want to stick with their best customers but they also want a wide range of products in various styles, wood types and colors to choose from.

“The more broad the product lines, the more valuable you are to them,” he said. “We found a couple of companies up there that are absolutely perfect, not just in manufacturing but philosophically. Neither of us had to change the way we do things.”

Moosehead’s way of conducting business has brought it recognition in the last two years. The Northeast Training and Employment Council, a committee of the region’s work force development state agencies, named the company “employer of the year” two years ago for its employee development in a rural area. Other honors have come from the Maine Wood Products Association, the Maine Forest Products Council – which named Moosehead as manufacturer of the year this year – and the Senate President’s Cornerstone Award.

Page said that although the honors are welcome, he prefers the comments he receives from customers, a kind of stamp of approval for the work they do.

Just recently, a woman told him that she once had a piece of Moosehead furniture that has since been passed down three generations in her family. It cost $400, she told him, pretty expensive at the time.

“And if it gets passed down one more time, that’s $100 a generation,” Page said. “That’s pretty good.”