Meet the Maker
Malcolm Cooper, Home Goods Maker
Malcolm’s father (Malcolm Cooper, Sr.) moved to Dorset, Vermont from New Jersey in 1949, after purchasing half-ownership in a woodworking business Josiah Knowles Adams had started in his garage five years earlier.
The company’s first success came through the popularity of a wooden pull toy car, the Speedy Racer—then by making measuring poles and tripods for the surveying industry.
But on April 13, 1962 (a Friday), disaster struck. A thermostat spark ignited fumes in the painting room and the factory (“30,000 square feet of wooden add-on buildings”) burned to the ground.
Malcolm said his dad “went around over the weekend and wrote checks to all the employees,” to ensure they had enough to live on. But then, “he came back Monday morning, and they were all back here helping clean up. And he said, ‘What are you doing? I can't pay you.’ They said, ‘Don't worry about that. Get in here and help us. If we get these machines out of the coals, they can be salvaged. A lot of this isn't badly damaged, it's just burned the paint off… You got a problem. Let's get this going.”
That was a turning point, Malcolm said. He said he felt his dad had been ready to walk away from the business. “He had a law degree and an engineering degree, and 10 years on Wall Street. He had a lot of opportunities to go somewhere else and take a big salary job. He was tough to work for, but he was a very bright guy and a very hard worker. But I think he probably said to himself that weekend, ‘I want to work with these people, these Vermont hill farmers.’”
He also, Malcolm said, “was never really obsessed with making money. He was more obsessed with making a good product. But it turned out that he was able to make some money.”
For their part, Malcolm said, the area's displaced farmers liked the opportunity that the factory offered. Their small farms were being subsumed by health regulations and technological changes that not all could respond to. “They'd come to work here and they thought, ‘This is great. I only have to work eight hours in a heated room with indoor plumbing, and I can still go home and work on the farm for five or six hours every day.’ And they were also pretty handy. They used to fix things. And so [my dad] found the workforce very, very refreshing.”
Malcolm’s dad tapped every source he knew for loans and rebuilt the factory after the fire. Then, in 1964, he fully bought Adams out, opting not to change the name of the company so as to save on reprinting new stationary.
Such thriftiness led to the company’s next big break.
“My father was a frugal Dutchman,” Malcolm said, “and he didn't want to throw anything away if he could avoid it. So the simplest thing you do with a chunk of wood that's just leftover when you're starting out in a small woodworking business, is you just sand the four edges, put a little oil on it, and call it a cutting board. So, on the shipping dock, after we shipped all the surveying equipment and these other parts, we put out a little pile of random-sized maple blocks with a sign: ‘Maple cutting boards; Random sizes. Put a dollar in the box.’ Literally with a slot in the top of a cigar box.”
People came from miles around to get those cutting boards. “So,” Malcolm said, “that was the start of our proprietary product line and our retail store. The surveying business continued on into the nineties.”
Malcolm’s dad was an engineer who loved to solve problems. Since they were making cutting boards, he said, my dad “decided to make a little rack to mount on the end of the kitchen counter, to store your knives in. Then somebody said, ‘My kids are going to come along and get their fingers in the knives.’ So he made a vertical block of wood about 16 inches tall with slots in it to put the knives in. I remember he brought it home, put it on the kitchen counter, put the knives in to try it out, slid it against the back wall, then couldn't lift the knives out [because of the upper cabinets]. So he took it back down to the factory the next morning and cut the bottom off at 45 degrees, then glued the cut off piece onto the existing block. He had just invented the angled knife block. They're all over the world now, but for about five years, we made the only angled knife block in the world.”
"But I think he probably said to himself that weekend, ‘I want to work with these people, these Vermont hill farmers.’”
Similar innovations led to the company’s invention and/or promulgation of spinning spice racks and tinker-toy styled wine racks, with hexagonal staves held together by wooden dowels. The staves were long crafted from cutoffs from ash tool handles from True Temper (formerly) up the road in Wallingford. “We did a million dollars one year in wine racks with just Crate and Barrel,” Malcolm said.
Even though he grew up in and around the business, Malcolm said, he “started off as a forklift driver. I'd been a ski instructor in Montana and a firefighter in the summer.”
His dad, he said “was demanding to work for, because he was very demanding of himself. But he was especially tough on me because he was determined that the other employees not think that I was getting preferential treatment, because I was a family member. It was probably hardest on my mom. She wanted to have a little bit of a life, but he never took a vacation. I mean, it's like lots of entrepreneurs. He'd say, ‘What do you want a vacation for? We live in vacation land, and people save up all year to come to Vermont.’ She said, ‘I'm here 12 months a year. I want to go to the Cape to see the ocean, or go to New York City to see a play.’ He'd grudgingly go down for a weekend. He just wanted to work. But I mean, you read how a lot of entrepreneurs are that way. They ignore their family, they just focus on their business.”
Malcolm, who turned 76 the day of our interview, was himself in the process of exiting the business that he and his father built over three quarters of a century. A few months earlier, he had sold JK Adams to its largest US competitor, John Boos & Co., of Illinois, a company that equally values US-manufactured goods, as well as the several dozen Vermont employees at the Dorset factory. “I've not been the owner now for two months,” Malcolm said, “so it's sort of weird. I'm completely relieved and completely sad all at the same moment.”
“I've always been proud of what we made,” he said. “Sometimes it was a love-hate relationship. Working with my father was tough. But I'd feel pretty proud to walk down Michigan Avenue and in the flagship Crate and Barrel store would be our product, right in the front window.
“I like making something that's not a throwaway item. This is the ultimate ecologically-sound product, because a piece of maple just rots into dirt. If you put a cutting board out in the forest, five years from now you won't be able to find it. It'll deteriorate, unless it's locust or something. And you cut down trees to make room for more trees to grow. I mean, if forests are well managed, you can keep growing trees forever.”
The Vermont Maker Project
