Business Exchange

GIL HARPER (President/CEO): (Voiceover) We sell the best outdoor furniture in the world.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Gil Harper's company Weatherend makes heirloom-quality outdoor furniture.

GIL: If you can build a piece of furniture that'll last on the coast of Maine, it'll last anywhere practically forever. It's heirloom quality. The Maine coast is probably some of the worst weather in the world, and when you build a yacht or you build a piece of outdoor furniture that can last 100 years, then it's going to be heirloom quality anywhere in the world.

HATTIE: So, Gil, how do you build a piece of furniture that lasts forever?

GIL: You've got to know how to use the materials.

(Voiceover) And you've got to know the methods of how to use those materials that you would use to build a yacht, that you would use to build any product that would last outdoors. It's the finish, the wood, but most of all, it's all of the methods. How do you put those materials together? If you don't put those materials together in their proper way, there's a weak-link chain, then the product will fail. You need to put them together, and that takes skill. That takes experience of a yacht builder, a boat builder, and we've done that. Ninety-eight percent of our customers are outside of the state of Maine, whether nationally or internationally.

HATTIE: You went to New York in 1984, and you called on architects, and they bought from you. How do you keep them buying from you?

GIL: Well, after making the initial contacts with some of the larger interior designers and architects, we found the success that was our vehicle to bring product across the country. And many of those interior designers and architects have offices in many cities across the country, so we continue to have vehicle.

(Voiceover) We advertise to those people. We present our product to those people with various representation around the country.

Where it starts is understanding your customer, where they buy, where they go to look at product, where they go to consider their needs. So it's really understanding where your customer is and where they'll go for that information. And our customer will go to a designer and architect; they'll go to a trade center.

(Voiceover) They'll look at a publication like Architectural Digest or Interior Design. Those are all places that they'll consider. So we need to be there where they're considering product of our level of quality.