SUNDAY PRINT EXCLUSIVE: Ferdinand's furniture wizard
Courier - Journal - Louisville, Ky.
Author: Matt Frassica
Date: Jul 31, 2011
Article Link ~ Archived LinkFerdinand is a town of about 2,000 between Jasper and Santa Claus, Ind., about an hour west of Louisville. The sign for the American Legion hall carries a cartoon of Ferdinand the bull, the town's unofficial mascot. Farther down Main Street, by the library and the high school, Keith Fritz Fine Furniture builds tables for people with such names as Bush, Cheney and Clinton.
The 34-year-old Fritz is lean and tall, with short-cropped hair. He speaks softly but radiates a kind of coiled intensity, as if working hard to contain the energies that have propelled him to build both a nationally lauded furniture company and a recession-defying small-business incubator in this tiny town.
"If something interests me, I spend all my time and energy on it," Fritz said, sitting on a couch in his sunny office. "If it doesn't interest me, I spend no time or energy. I don't know anything about sports. And I'm not much good at a party."
Fritz's workshop specializes in tables. It builds pieces to order, one by one, to clients' specifications. At the low end, his dining tables sell for $10,000.
Two of Fritz's clients, Bill and Allison Kaiser of Jasper, had a huge, 175-year-old white oak on their property. "We didn't want to take the tree down, but we were advised that we should," Bill Kaiser said.
On the recommendation of a friend, they commissioned Fritz to make a large dining table out of boards cut from the tree.
"He took it all upon himself to design it, and it's now a centerpiece in our house," Kaiser said. "It's a whopping, big beautiful table."
National recognition
On the Fourth of July, Fritz was honored in an awards ceremony in the U.S. Capitol. The awards, called Made: In America, recognize domestic industry -- usually large-scale manufacturing companies. But after receiving Fritz's application, the organization created a new category for craftspeople at the top of their fields.
"Just looking at the pieces, it was astounding," said James De Lorbe, chairman of Made: In America. "I felt like I was reviewing a submission from Thomas Chippendale."
Talk to anyone who works with Fritz and one of the first things mentioned is his dedication. "It's not just a job for Keith," said Allen Kirsch, a Dallas interior designer. "It's really a calling, a passion."
"Keith signs his furniture," said Jim Dinkle, president of the Dubois County (Ind.) Area Development Corp. "I often say if you watch the 'Antiques Roadshow' in a hundred years, people will refer to his furniture as 'a Fritz.'"
Unlike most owners of furniture companies, Fritz delivers the pieces himself to clients all over the country. On his road trips to Chicago, Boston, Dallas and Washington, D.C., he listens to books on CD.
"I like to listen to political biographies," Fritz said. "I'll get to D.C., and I'll talk to someone with first-hand experience with these people."
On the wall in his office, Fritz has a framed photo of himself with Bill Clinton. In the photo, the former president holds a half-eaten piece of pizza.
Does it feel strange that his furniture belongs to famous and powerful people? "In the beginning it was strange, but people are people," Fritz said.
"It wore off when I did that work for the Clintons. Who's more famous than the Clintons? You get to see that they've got refrigerator magnets just like I do."
Stone soup as business model
Fritz also owns the building that houses his company's workshop. In it, he's running an experiment in communal entrepreneurship.
When he bought the old warehouse at 1440 Main St., in 2008, its 50,000-square-foot space was much larger than what he needed for his workshop. So he held public meetings to solicit ideas for what to do with the rest of the space, and the idea for an antique mall emerged.
Fritz and his business manager, Barb Mathies, underestimated the demand for space. "The word got out, and people got in here," Mathies said. Before the renovation was finished, vendors clamored to set up even in unheated areas. A little more than a year after opening, 50 sellers rent space.
In areas subdivided from the main showroom, Fritz provides low-cost space for small businesses that otherwise couldn't afford commercial rents -- including a coffee shop, violin maker and web designer. A masseur will move in shortly.
Fritz rents the space below market rate, and if a tenant can't make a payment, he'll accept services in barter. "You couldn't ask for a more understanding landlord than Keith," said Matthew Gilbert, the violin maker.
"The people here in the building are my family," Fritz explained. "I help them out, they help me out."
The businesses stay afloat through cooperation. Several of the businesses share a single credit-card machine. Fritz uses the rental income to pay off loans he took out for the building and to invest in the furniture company.
"If you took all of us, split us up, put us on the street, none of us could make it on our own," he said.
The kid from Siberia
Fritz grew up a short drive away in the town of Siberia. His father was a builder, and he liked making things. By the time he entered high school, Fritz had become fixated on furniture.
He collected used books on antiques and studied them. When he was 15, he set out to design the ultimate piece of furniture, with details cobbled together from all the great furniture makers he had read about.
The result, an ornate secretary with a spectacularly detailed inlay of an eagle, towers over the front counter of the antique mall. "I designed what I thought was the most amazing piece of furniture that I could imagine," he said. It took him 1,200 hours to build and won a statewide contest in woodworking.
When the piece was nearly finished, he traveled with his mother to Philadelphia. There, he finally laid eyes on some of the furniture he was emulating. He crawled underneath the pieces, investigating the parts that weren't shown in his books.
"This is like folk art," he said of the secretary. "This is some little kid in Indiana reading some books, and then copying what he thinks he sees."
Fritz now considers the piece crude compared with the originals he admired. But imagine some kid with no musical training learning to play the Goldberg Variations by listening to an old Glenn Gould record. The kid might lack technical finesse, but he's a different creature entirely from the dutiful students hunting and pecking their way through piano lessons.
After graduating from Perry County High School, Fritz went to seminary, with the intention of becoming a priest. He enrolled at St. Meinrad College, south of Siberia, and later attended Theological College, the seminary of Catholic University, in Washington.
The spiritual life appealed to Fritz, and the area of Indiana where he grew up is dotted with seminaries and monasteries. Today, just up the hill from his workshop, the terra cotta dome of the Sisters of St. Benedict monastery towers over the town.
Once at Theological College, Fritz set up a woodshop in a basement to continue his metier on the side. Once some of his closest friends in the priesthood saw the quality of his work and the strength of his dedication, they advised him to consider leaving seminary to pursue his woodworking.
"There are a lot of priests that are gifted musicians or they're gifted in the arts and they do not have time to do that," Fritz said. "Some of them were saying to me, 'Keith, I was never able to do my art. Do your art.'"
Doing his art
Fritz followed their advice. He left seminary and opened a workshop in Washington. That's where he began to attract the attention of high-end designers and their powerful clients. After a few years, he sold his small building -- its value had tripled -- and moved back to Southern Indiana, where he could keep his overhead costs down.
Setting up first in Jasper and then in Ferdinand, Fritz has continued to grow his business. His furniture is on display in showrooms in New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Boston, Chicago and Washington.
Fritz estimates that, by August, he will have done as much business as he did in all of 2010. He has booked his delivery schedule through the end of the year, alternating roughly two weeks on the road and two weeks at home.
But although the pieces are pricey, the furniture company has never made much money. Even in Southern Indiana, production costs are high, given Fritz's skilled workers and the man-hours devoted to each piece.
"Historically I've made money in real estate, and that money has been absorbed by the furniture company," he said. "For me, the profit is in doing what I love, and allowing other people to do what they love."
Any additional income, Fritz said, will go toward raises for his employees. "If you want good work, it costs money."
As a result, Fritz doesn't keep furniture for himself. Everything that comes out of the workshop is spoken for, either by clients or his showrooms, where new pieces are in constant demand.
Fritz's office, upstairs from the antique mall, is sparely decorated in the style of a church rectory. In fact, he salvaged the built-in bookcases from a Theological College building undergoing renovation. The doors were made by St. Meinrad's monks in the 1880s. His sofa and chairs are second-hand.
"I'm not wealthy," Fritz said of his frugality. "Our clients are spending their interest; I'm trying to make my payments."
As for 1440 Main, rents from the antiques dealers and small businesses are on track to pay back Fritz's loans to local investors within seven years. He's building out the second floor, adding residential space for employees and for a possible bed-and-breakfast venture.
Fritz describes the building and its role cultivating small businesses as an exercise in modest, mutually supportive enterprise -- something like a monastery.
"For me, I feel like I can do more good by being an entrepreneur than by being a monk," he said. "I have a lot of friends who are monks, and they're like, 'Keith, you are the abbot of your own community.'"
But unlike monks planting vegetables or brewing Belgian beer, Fritz is growing businesses on this resistant patch of Southern Indiana soil.
Reporter Matt Frassica can be reached at (502) 582-4502.