Tracey Taylor

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New York Times, April 23 2009

Michael Goldin, president of Swerve. Photograph by Peter DaSilva , New York Times.

In a timeworn factory in Sausalito, Calif., 67 workers turn out Heath ceramics, doing everything from mixing the clay to applying the finishing glazes. Twenty miles away, a Japanese robot called Ziggy works day and night in a converted brass foundry in Berkeley, making precision-cut office furniture.

What the two neighboring factories demonstrate is that it is still possible to manufacture high-quality products in one of the most expensive locations in the United States — even in the grip of an economic recession.

And while both are being forced to adapt to the tough times, the two businesses have been helped by the fact that their products are made in America.

“In hard economic times, a slogan built around ‘Buy American’ is going to resonate a little more,” said Steven J. Davis, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “People read stories about unemployed Americans and they want to feel good when they make consumption decisions.”

Professor Davis said manufacturing was generally moving outside wealthier countries like the United States. “Only an outbreak of protectionist policies or a sharp rise in international shipping costs could slow or temporarily reverse manufacturing’s declining share of employment in the United States,” he said.

Still, there still seems to be an appetite for products from high-end, craft-based manufacturers in America. That proved to be the major reason that Robin Petravic and his wife, Catherine Bailey, bought Heath Ceramics six years ago even though competition from abroad had forced most artisanal potteries across the country to shut down.

They said that when they first walked into Heath’s factory in one of Sausalito’s former shipyards, they decided that Heath’s idiosyncratic way of doing things and its geographical roots could prove to be its salvation. They said they were struck by the fact that every part of the manufacturing process was under one roof. “Many of the employees had worked there for decades and knew everything, including how to fix the machines if they broke down,” Ms. Bailey said.

The company was founded in the mid-1940s by Edith Heath, a ceramicist and creative spirit, and her husband, Brian, an inventor. The company quickly earned a reputation for durable, finely crafted tableware and tile whose clean, modernist lines signaled a break from the more fussy designs of the past.

It would seem at first glance that little has changed at Heath’s dusty, 30,000-square-foot factory in the time since — the tableware and tile are made in the same sustainable, labor-intensive way they have always been. Some lines, like the Coupe pattern, have been in constant production since 1948.

But change has come with the need to make the manufacturing more efficient, cater to the current design aesthetic and respond with agility to the economic downturn. New production systems have been introduced, and dusty pink has been removed from the palette in favor of more contemporary glazing hues like persimmon and cocoa.

In January, Heath introduced a line of less expensive tile. While previously all of Heath’s tile was made to order, the Modern Basics line can be bought off the shelf in a limited selection of colors and shapes. It is about 40 percent cheaper than the custom tile.

Heath’s mix of sales channels has also been adjusted, with wholesale taking a backseat to more direct routes, like the company’s Web site, its factory store and a new retail outlet, which opened in December in Los Angeles. “That’s where we can be most effective and react most quickly,” said Mr. Petravic, a former product designer who developed the business plan.

The factory store, he said, helps them learn which new designs work and which ones do not. It has also reinforced the couple’s commitment to manufacturing in the United States. “We can test the market and avoid suffering from our mistakes,” he said. “If we try something that turns out not to be popular, maybe we have made 100.”

In 2008, Heath’s sales increased fivefold and its profit margin was about 8 percent. The company increased its employee roster to 67 from 25. This year the goal, Mr. Petravic said, is simply to stay flat.

Reinier Evers, founder of Trendwatching.com, which tracks consumer habits, agreed that Heath seemed to be benefiting from consumers’ renewed interest in homegrown products. How products are made is on consumers’ radar, he said. “There’s a story that consumers can tell themselves, or better, the ‘status story’ they can tell their peers to gain recognition.”

Michael Goldin, an architect and industrial designer, has also tied his company’s fate to that trend. For the last 14 years, Mr. Goldin has been contributing to the rejuvenation of a light-industrial district in Berkeley. He transformed an abandoned model airplane motor factory into his office and has designed and outfitted streamlined, open-plan office spaces for lawyers, architects and dotcom start-ups in Berkeley and neighboring Emeryville.

Mr. Goldin’s company, Swerve, has also been making furniture, seeking out the technology required to produce precision-cut aluminum taper joints and machine-tooled, eco-friendly work surfaces for the desks, workstations and shelving systems.

For Mr. Goldin, outsourcing was never an option. “Ever since I was at grad school I have felt very strongly about having my hands in what I am making — actually feeling materials and how they work,” he said. “It all started with my desire to make things and to have a shop where I could do that.”

Outsourcing, he said, would also make it difficult to ensure high design and craftsmanship standards. “How do you keep track?” he asked. “How do you make sure your product comes to you as you specified it? Overseeing the process would require constant traveling back and forth.”

In any case, having Swerve’s pieces made overseas would compromise the company’s just-in-time manufacturing model. “We always make our products to order. We can’t afford to keep items in stock,” Mr. Goldin said. “If we went overseas we would have to order huge inventory ahead of time. And we’re not ready for that.”

The company’s labor costs are kept low because of its reliance on computerized cutting machines, including a new canary yellow robot from Japan, nicknamed Ziggy by the employees, which works 24 hours a day. Of Swerve’s 15 employees, only four work on the shop floor.

In the last few months, Mr. Goldin has had to make some hard choices to ensure that Swerve rides out the economic crisis. A recent order for 500 aluminum-framed chairs will be completed at cost.

He and his administrative staff have vacated the factory’s sleek offices and some income-generating tenants have moved in. And his employees have all agreed to salary cuts. But he believes more strongly than ever that outsourcing would be the wrong choice. “Of all times, we need to do what we can to keep jobs here,” he said.

Both Mr. Goldin and the owners of Heath say they hope what they have achieved will stand as a model for other small- and medium-size businesses facing the critical question of whether to locate production locally or in low-cost offshore sites. As Ms. Bailey put it, “The craft of manufacturing has to a great extent been lost as a value in American culture, and we are striving to retain it.”

San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 2009

It’s no wonder the real estate broker hesitates when I ask her who she thinks might buy her listing at 1471 La Loma Ave. in North Berkeley. “A writer perhaps, or someone who’s looking for a pied-a-terre and appreciates history,” muses Susie Schevill from the Grubb Co. For the property in question, a 724-square-foot building known as thee cubby house, is without a doubt unusual.

The cubby was designed by noted Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck in 1925, as a garage to house his prized Packard automobile. Not that he knew how to drive. He had students and family members chauffeur him to engagements. The garage was one of several buildings on Maybeck’s 1-acre compound, part of what was known as Nut Hill, which included the Sack House, built in 1924, and a nearby cottage.

Originally a simple, one-room structure with a vaulted ceiling and French doors at either end, the cubby was fairly swiftly commandeered by Maybeck’s extended family as diminutive living quarters. About 1930, Maybeck’s son Wallen, with his wife, Jacomena, and their young twin girls, moved in. “We were a tight fit in the cubby house,” recalls Jacomena Maybeck in her memoir “Maybeck: The Family View.”

She describes how they built a chicken-wire fence around the house to contain the twins and how they in turn rapidly learned to climb over it in order to have the run of the estate.

Cherry Nittler, one of those two little girls, who now lives in Santa Cruz, remembers those days well. “We thoroughly enjoyed living there as children,” she says, speaking of herself and her sister, Sheila, when they were about 4 years old. “We would get up early in the morning, climb over the chicken wire and take the path up to Little Granny’s (Annie Maybeck, wife of Bernard) and Ben’s (Bernard Maybeck). We would knock on the door and say, ‘Can both of me come in?’ Then we would hop into bed with them and they would rub our backs.”

The Maybeck clan’s days were characterized by a blend of simple living, industry and socializing, in keeping with the patriarch’s preference for an honest life in harmony with nature. Everyone was expected to pitch in when jobs needed to be done on the compound; creature comforts were kept to a minimum, and yet evenings spent sharing food and conversation with neighboring UC Berkeley professors and creative peers, such as protege-architect Julia Morgan, were common.

“We did everything in the simplest, least expensive and most unpretentious way,” Jacomena says. “It was a world of love and laughter and hard work.”

And, Nittler says, “there was always some kind of building going on.” It didn’t take long for Wallen and Jacomena to upgrade the cubby  house, which, although plain, displays several Maybeck features, including rustic redwood paneling, exposed roof beams stained a pleasing shade of teal and a cast-concrete outdoor bench.

Also typical were the building’s substantial eaves which were exploited to add living space. “We utilized the 4-foot overhangs [by putting] the walls out that far and we put a little bathroom, a toilet and basin in one corner,” Jacomena remembers. Afterward, in the opposite corner, came a stove, a draining board and sink. “And that was the kitchen,” she writes. It still is.

A second-story bedroom, full bathroom and walk-in closet were added later, built into the gradient of the hill and accessed by an indoor staircase. There is a patio on the main level and a deck and sitting area with bay views on the upper level, reached by another set of French doors.

The cubby house stayed in the Maybeck family until 1972, when Jacomena, who had by then been living for many years in a more substantial home close by, sold it to the daughter of her longtime renter, Mamie Minor, for $27,200.

Now it is the turn of Mamie Minor’s grandson, who is overseeing the present sale of the house, to speak wistfully of the happy times he spent within its four walls. “It was the place where all the family would gather at Christmas and Thanksgiving,” he says, conjuring a picture of a dozen or more people squeezed around a large table in the cozy open-plan living space. He says his family has a strong emotional attachment to the house and that it’s a reluctant sale.

As for Bernard Maybeck, one can only speculate what he might have thought of the way things worked out. The Packard was a gift from a client, Earle C. Anthony, the owner of two Packard showrooms in San Francisco and Oakland for whom Maybeck designed a lavish, Mediterranean-style home in Los Angeles. Today the car is reportedly for sale, priced at $140,000.

And the garage for which it was built? Maybeck would surely be astonished to hear that it’s in contract for around half a million dollars and due to close early next month.