Ralph’s Frame Works provides high-end wood frames to some of the industry’s top residential furniture brands including Baker, Henredon, Michael Thomas, and Stickley; as well as institutional leaders AC Furniture, OFS Brands (Carolina), and Southfield Furniture.
“We were able to diversify our business by expanding our capabilities beyond residential into frames for office, healthcare, and hospitality furniture”, says owner Tommy Rice. “This has allowed us to keep growing even as the residential business has slowed. Our current production mix is approximately 50 percent hospitality, 30 percent healthcare, and 20 percent residential.”
This manufacturing flexibility helps the company better meet the needs of a wide range of clients. Patrician Furniture, the company’s oldest customer, produces furniture for businesses, universities, hotels, hospitals and government facilities. Succeeding in these diverse market segments has required Ralph’s management and production teams to learn, develop, and manage a wide range of capabilities and business processes.
“One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was how to work in the contract furniture business,” added Rice. “We like the fact that there is greater volume of orders upfront, but we often don’t see the repeat business like we do with residential. The pressure of working in this model is that we must do much more engineering and development work on a product that we may only produce once. With contract furniture, we may get a single order for 300 pieces and then never see it again. But even with reorders, some residential orders may add up to only 300 pieces over the entire lifetime of the product.”
An important key to the modern day success of Ralphs’ Frame Works is the product development expertise that they have honed over the years. Rice leverages these skills and supporting technology as a competitive advantage to win new business and strengthen existing relationships.
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