Jeff Linville — Furniture Today,
HIGH POINT — New President Richard Henkel has added experience to the staff of case goods importer Mirador and has tightened its business model.


Since joining the company two months ago, Henkel has narrowed the number of product introductions planned for October, cut the SKU count in half, limited import sources and hired industry veteran and friend Hal McAdams Jr. as vice president of sales and marketing.

Henkel, one-time president of Hickory White, also is moving Mirador’s High Point showroom from its outlying headquarters to Market on Green in the downtown district.

As soon as he was hired, Henkel began informally polling retailers about their experiences with Mirador. He asked what they would change.

“They said poor delivery, better customer service and the showroom location,” he said.

While retailers loved the look of the product, delivery times weren’t always consistent, he said. A big part of the problem was that, last year,  Mirador had 650 SKUs coming from 11 foreign factories.

And it kept adding more. For example, at the Las Vegas market in July, Mirador introduced 15 cabinets for flat-panel TVs. Retailers liked them, but only bought two or three styles each. This created a problem getting enough orders for any one product. McAdams looked over the line of 20 flat-panel cabinets and reduced the choices to six for this market.

Overall, Mirador had dropped 200 SKUs in the year before Henkel and McAdams joined. Since they arrived, another 250 have been cut, trimming the line to 200 high-performing pieces.

Henkel said 143 items originally were on the drawing board for October, but he and McAdams are editing that to about 30 to 40 new pieces for the show.

On his first trip to Asia for the company, Henkel visited nine factories in a week and a half. Realizing that this was too much diversification, he cut the sourcing options down to three primary factories. The owner of one plant is a partner in Mirador, which Henkel believes is an asset to the company.

Co-owner and founder Dan Wistehuff, a designer by trade, started Mirador six years ago with his son, Dan Jr., who is no longer with the company.

A year ago, Wistehuff hired Glenn Farabe as vice president of product development and quality control. Farabe spoke to Henkel, a consultant at the time, about Mirador’s problems in hopes that Henkel could help.
Wistehuff surprised Henkel by asking him to take over the business for then-President Paul Megliola, who left the company and returned to his own consulting practice. The move allowed Wistehuff to turn his focus back to design.

McAdams recently joined the team after spending more than three years in a turnaround situation at Vermont Tubbs. He previously worked for Thomasville and White Furniture, which merged into Hickory White. He replaces Bryan Edwards, who left Mirador earlier this year to join manufacturer Aspenhome.

Together, Henkel, McAdams, Farabe and Dan Wistehuff have 163 years of furniture experience.

Henkel’s father and both grandfathers worked in the industry for Basic-Witz, which was later bought by Stanley Furniture. Henkel started at Basic-Witz and worked for Simmons, Hammary, Brookwood, Hickory White and Doxey.

With senior leadership in place at Mirador, Henkel moved to revamp customer service, starting with hiring a customer service manager.

Looking ahead, he wants to reduce Mirador’s U.S. warehousing and add Asian storage. The company has done little volume in mixed containers, but an Asian distribution center could change that. Such a move would reduce the need for domestic space, which he wants to cut from 120,000 square feet to 50,000 square feet.

Between now and the October market, Mirador will spread the word about its new downtown showroom. The current location is “so far out of the mainstream” that busy retailers didn’t want to take the time during market to drive there, Henkel said.

While its old showroom crammed hundreds of SKUs into 8,000 square feet, the new space will have 10,000 square feet to show fewer pieces in what the company believes will be a more proper display of its upper-medium-priced goods.

While the list of intros is still being refined, one group that’s a definite go for market is the Scottsdale bedroom group, to be added to an existing line of occasional and dining. In cherry veneers with distinctive etched aluminum, the queen bed will retail for $1,999, and a four-piece group will retail between $6,500 and $7,500.