Page 22 - CMA PROfiles Fall 2018

20 YEARS 20TH ANNIVERSARY NOW AND THEN

GOING
STRONG
Celebrating
1998 2018

Now and then:

Matt and Shelley Wehner

It was fun to look back at the article and reflect. Around that
time, we were thinking about three new directions – getting into
In each issue the closet business, starting our own finishing department, and

of 2018, we’ve incorporating a frameless/Euro construction method. I’m happy
to say that we followed through on all three.
marked
CLOSET STRATEGIZING
our 20th Closets have been a huge catalyst for our success in the past
anniversary four years, becoming one of our most profitable products.

by checking Cabinets are great, and they look pretty, but closets are so
simple to design — or maybe “simple” isn’t the right word. We’ve
back in with designed some pretty complicated closets, but if we run into a

members problem, it’s so easy to fix. Closet components also bypass all of
our typical cabinet production bottlenecks (usually the door and
whose shops finishing departments).

have been There was another factor in our closet decision: technology
featured in investments. We had purchased a CNC machine mainly to
become more efficient in building cabinets, and next we decided
PROfiles. to explore edgebanders. We didn’t know a lot about them, so we
bought a very old, rudimentary edgebander for $6,000 to test
For our final anniversary year issue, we’re the waters and see how efficient it would make us. Once we tried

featuring an update from Matt and Shelley out the old one, we knew right away we needed a much better
edgebander to speed our production. To justify the purchase
Wehner of Cabinet Concepts by Design in of a Cehisa – I think it was about $53,000 – we became serious

Springfield, Missouri. The Wehners were about getting into the closet business.
featured in the first issue of 2015; back then, We knew closets were a big thing with millennials who were
moving into smaller places and wanting to maximize their space.
they were happy that their leap of faith — No one in our local region manufactured closets, but there were
buying a cabinetry business despite having two companies that purchased the parts and installed them.

no cabinetry experience — had paid off. Through our market research, we discovered that the margin
on closets was great and that the process our competition went
We spoke with Matt Wehner recently to get through to get quotes and design back to clients was really
an update. cumbersome compared to the way we do business; unlike our
competition, we could do design in-house, for example. With

20 PROFILES FALL 2018