In less than a decade, Fabuwood has grown to an enterprise with 800 employees and a million square feet of high-tech manufacturing and warehousing space. By Dianne M. Pogoda
As Joel Epstein takes invited visitors on a tour of his Fabuwood cabinet manufacturing factory in a bustling industrial corridor in Northern New Jersey, he points out that it’s “Killer Week.”
“We are a little behind on our production, so this week, our shifts are putting in 66 hours to increase production,” he says. “And by the end of the week, we’ll be caught up.”
As the affable chief operating officer walks through the factory, the floor is humming, forklifts with pallets stacked high with materials driving by, workers are engrossed in assembly, finishing, customizing, fixing dings, packaging and preparing orders for inventory. As he passes, he makes an effort to smile and say hi to as many members of the crew as possible, who respond with hellos, handshakes, nods and waves.
It’s hard work, but the employees possess an upbeat attitude that’s palpable.
“We had a union vote in here about a year ago, and the employees voted by 70 percent to stay non-union,” Epstein relates. “We try to take good care of our people.”
Epstein insists on open communication between the workers and management — in fact, he and partner Michael Panzer, chief executive officer, regularly walk the factory floor to establish rapport with the staff. The company hosts a “family day” every year, renting out a park, providing food, transportation, games and activities and hiring performers. This year, 5,000 people attended — and everyone got a T-shirt. Last year, during the solar eclipse, Fabuwood closed down the shop for an hour (but everyone was still paid), provided eclipse safety glasses to the entire company and let the staff witness the historic event.
Fabuwood was started in 2009, just after the worst crush of the Great Recession, by Epstein and Panzer, who were each working elsewhere in the industry at different companies. They built the cabinet firm from the ground up, starting with about 123,000 square feet of office and manufacturing space in Jersey City, and about 40 employees. In less than a decade, they’ve created about 800 jobs, drawing many from the Newark-Elizabeth-Jersey City area, but also from New York — the city, its boroughs and upstate. Significantly, the effort demonstrates that it is possible to build a domestic manufacturing facility and thrive in a competitive marketplace. Revenue will hit between $100 million and $200 million this year, with robust growth on pace to continue. “We’re not slowing down,” Epstein says.
Since the company opened, it has been adding an average of one new employee each week. The official count stands at 780, with 50 jobs open. “We’ve also been averaging one new kitchen dealer a day since we opened,” he notes.
Fabuwood’s growth has been so vigorous, in fact, that the company is consolidating its four spaces (currently totaling about 650,000 to 700,000 square feet) scattered around the area into one building of warehousing and manufacturing in Newark. When completed in coming weeks, the gleaming new facility will provide about a million square feet of operations — some 700,000 square feet of production and warehousing, with a 300,000 square-foot mezzanine. Epstein said the company might also keep its 300,000-square-foot main building in Jersey City as well, and the company expects to be fully moved into the new facility by the end of August.
“We project to be at about 1,200 jobs in the next two years — just in the new building. Production will be doubled by the end of this year, but because of our efficiency and our investment in technology, we can increase production so much without having to double the employees.”
Some warehousing is already in the new building, on which Fabuwood holds a 25-year lease, and a recent visit revealed installation of state-of-the art assembly lines, work stations, custom-build and finishing zones, and steel racks of inventory rising to the full height of the 40-foot ceilings. The new space will also house offices for executives, customer service, technology and software development, as well as a showroom.
“We made significant investments to customize the new facility for machinery, equipment and efficiency,” says Panzer. The company also received tax incentives to locate in the impoverished area — which required strict compliance to environmental standards and regulations. “Our Newark facility was designed and built to ‘green’ building standards.”
And, as the 42-acre tract abuts a waterway, the entire building was erected 17 feet above sea level to minimize the risk of potential flooding.
The developer, The Morris Cos., assembled the property from nine different parcels. Fabuwood began the process in January 2016 with Morris, which designed and built the facility to the cabinet maker’s specs.
Fabuwood’s executives and product development team design and bring precise specifications to a network of factories around the world for the production of component parts. The company assembles a full array of standard cabinets, stocked in three grades, on a per-order basis. Some 27 combinations of colors and door styles are available in various lines in the three collections. The cabinet pieces are produced and shipped flat, arriving in New Jersey, where they are inventoried until needed. As orders come in through the proprietary online system, the boxes are assembled and customized as necessary, whether it’s in the finishing, accessorizing or touching up any imperfections. When an order requires a special piece, such as an odd-size or custom-fit cabinet, a “statement piece” to be the focal point of the design, molding or trim/fill pieces, the company’s custom department crafts the cabinet on the spot.
“We very rarely back-order a cabinet,” says Izzy Zabner, a product specialist who designs and troubleshoots issues that might arise, as well as oversees many aspects of production. “We have about a seven-day lead time for our stock cabinets. If a cabinet is missing or damaged from the shipment, we won’t bother reordering it, we’ll just build it from scratch so we don’t hold up the job.”
Epstein adds, “We can make thousands of cabinets a day, and of those, 25 to 30 percent are custom,” noting that Fabuwood adds dollar-for-dollar value to the components coming in from its global sourcing network.
Zabner points out that the signature collections feature half-inch plywood framed cabinets with flush top and bottom shelves (“this allows installers to flip the boxes if needed”); ¾-inch shelves that are edged all around, not just on the front edge; all-natural interiors, and Blum hinges and drawer runners for slow-close action. Drawers are full-extension with dovetail construction and 3/8-inch bottoms; Shelf brackets are metal, and the holes for the brackets are 6 mm in diameter — smaller than the industry standard of 8 mm. “It just looks nicer,” he says.
Fabuwood also will build custom hood liners — finished with a stainless-steel coating on the underside to blend in with the hood when looking up from the bottom — and will also custom-finish range hoods sent by customers from other companies to match the cabinet order.
The company uses Rev-A-Shelf accessories, like trash and recycling inserts, pull-out spice racks or tool holders, and its roll-out systems have five notches for maximum adjustability.
It also offers natural-finish interiors, optional glass shelves, and can customize or special-order doors if a consumer wants a different look, or will mix features of a more expensive collection to create a statement in a kitchen, even if the less-expensive line is the predominant cabinetry used to stick within a customer’s budget.
“Our product development team reacts to customer and designer feedback,” Zabner says. “For example, we used to only stock standard 24, 30 and 36-inch cabinets, but now we offer 27 and 33 inches, because we saw a demand.”
All this information can be entered into Fabuwood’s exclusive EZ Pricing online ordering system, as well as any other customization details, simplifying the process for dealers.
One of the key components of Fabuwood’s operations is its state-of-the-art technology. This includes such mechanical elements as forklifts that follow laser signals built into the floor, so the greatest number of inventory racks can be installed in the minimum amount of space, without danger of the forklifts running into the racks; computerized box-cutting machines that spit out the precise size boxes — via barcode communication technology — for specific cabinets as they come off the line; automated painting and finishing equipment for custom jobs; sensor-driven conveyors and assembly line equipment — the same systems used by Amazon, according to Zabner — and its proprietary software.
The exclusive software programs, developed in-house, track multiple systems, from shipping, receiving and inventory to product assembly, to completion of orders and more. “Every detail of assembly, from basic box construction to whether a specific accessory is installed, is tracked via a barcode accessed via a handheld PDA,” Zabner points out. “We know the status of every part of every job at any given time. And the programs insure that a job can’t proceed if any part of the order is incomplete. The program sends alerts if something is missing so we can rectify and finish the order.
“We have so many complete orders in the warehouse that were finished too early for customers to receive them!” he chuckles.
The key to the operation is its emphasis on technology, efficiency — and its people, says Epstein.
“We hire based on energy and a good attitude,” Epstein explains. “If you’re the right person for our company, we’ll get you the training you need to be better. We’re constantly investing in updating technology and our efficiency. And because we don’t have a big corporate structure, we can make decisions very quickly.”
Epstein believes that American manufacturing is not all being lost to China, rather, it’s being lost to inefficiency and failure to upgrade technology and other systems.
“Our success is owing to speed — we just get it done, and done fast,” he says. “Some kitchen cabinet manufacturers have not adopted this yet. In this day, you just cannot tell consumers that they will have their kitchen in two to three months. With the machinery and technology now available, there’s no reason to have the same lead time on custom cabinets as 30 to 40 years ago.
“Fabuwood aims to change the kitchen and bath industry to meet the expectations of today’s consumer.”
