Schweiger shuts doors
105-year-old name remains up for sale
By Gary Evans -- Furniture Today, May 31, 2004
JEFFERSON, Wis. — JEFFERSON, Wis. — Only a dozen employees were left last week at Schweiger, cleaning up the remains from an auction of the upholstery manufacturer's equipment and getting the factory here ready for a new use.
Mostly woodworking equipment was sold, but a handful of local upholsterers snapped up upholstering equipment, said President Leon Wilkosz. Fabric had been sold earlier, and most of the stock of midpriced sofas, chairs, loveseats, ottomans and tables had been liquidated in an effort to reduce finished inventory and bring the company's price down.
Last-minute efforts to sell the company failed, and last week's mop-up was probably the final chapter in Schweiger's 105-year history. The closing caught some of the company's customers by surprise, despite the company's mid-March announcement that it would either find a buyer or shut down.
"We are sorry to see them go," said John Folsom Sr., an owner of Folsoms, with stores in Scarborough and Alfred, Maine. "We carried one or two collections of upholstery and did quite well with their sofa-sleepers. It was a good line, moderately priced and scaled right."
Don Kubnick, on the sales staff of Bush & Gilles, a Schweiger customer in Spooner, Wis., said he read about the company's demise in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
"We used to do a lot with Schweiger but we'd pretty much phased them out," Kubnick said. "We carried a few pieces, more in the Woodlands collection. But it got to the point where getting their end tables and stuff from China was a pain. We were four or five months to get an end table. We had a lot of hot customers."
Bush & Gilles' three stores probably won't replace the Schweiger line, since the retailer is happy with the upholstery it buys from Marshfield and La-Z-Boy. "That's not to take anything from Schweiger," Kubnick said. "They made a nice sofa."
In the 1970s, Schweiger employed over 1,000 workers and had plants in Virginia, Mississippi, Utah and here. In 1986, when the company bought a 135,000-square-foot plant in Victoria, Va., a story in Furniture/Today pegged sales at $80 million. Last year's sales were $18.5 million. The company closed with 130 employees.
Ironically, Wilkosz said the last two years were the best the company has had since it was bought out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in the mid-'90s by K.C. Stock, owner of Green Bay, Wis.-based KCS International. Stock recently announced he was retiring and would dispose of all but his core businesses.
"We are a small holding in his portfolio," Wilkosz said, noting that Stock plans to retain major holdings in boating and Florida real estate. The company had been adversely affected by the downward price pressure created by imports, Wilkosz said.
Stock bought the company for $7 million, and was one of several suitors at the time. This time there was no stampede for the company's assets.
"The domestic people we talked to were not looking to invest in domestic manufacturers," said Wilkosz, noting that offers the company did get "were from people who were not furniture manufacturers. I think we did everything we could on our end. There just wasn't enough money."
The company plans to sell its 580,000-square-foot building here, a third of which is leased to small-engine maker Briggs & Stratton, which is planning to expand to 400,000 square feet. The Virginia facility, closed in 1996, also is on the block.
Wilkosz said the company is still talking to prospective buyers. "We had a niche. There are still a couple of people looking at the name."
