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| Handcrafted: Hattie Brown the grandmother of toy plant owner Michael Rainville, makes wooden blocks. She's one of three generations
of family members to help out at Maple Landmark. Nicole Hill |
A Vermont toymaker sees business boom after China scare
The family-run manufacturing plant has expanded its workforce by two thirds – and the order backlog is still triple that of last year.
By Cynthia Anderson | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the December 24, 2007 edition
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MIDDLEBURY, VT. - Despite the inescapable presence of 150 half-filled orders taped to the wall, the atmosphere in the assembly room at Maple Landmark remains calm during this final push before Christmas. Women seated at the NameTrain workbench banter as cars for the letter "O" take form beneath their hands. A woman fixes magnets to the ends of each item before passing it to someone who inserts axles. By the end of the line, every "O" car is complete – a small rolling entity that retails for $5.
Boxes of dominos, baby rattles, and wooden jeeps are stacked around the room, evidence of a productivity that would make Henry Ford proud. Parts for the toys are manufactured downstairs through the same marriage of automation and the touch of human assembly. In the graphics room, a laser engraves ties on train tracks under watchful eyes, while in an adjacent area workers run the routers that cut the tracks as well as the sanders that smooth them.
Overseeing it all is the company's president, Mike Rainville, whose management style combines a concrete linearity (he majored in engineering) with Vermont informality and a storyteller's heart. Mr. Rainville is seemingly everywhere. In one motion he checks the progress of the trains, sifts through a bin of wheels, then stops to say hi to his grandmother, who is assembling Soma cubes at a nearby table.
Meanwhile, the orders loom, reminders of all that must be done. "Our inventory's been toast," says Rainville. "We've been running as fast as we could since Labor Day."
•••
Rainville remembers exactly what he was doing on June 14, the day the recall of 1.5 million lead-contaminated Thomas & Friends' railway toys manufactured in China was announced.
Returning home from a history competition in Maryland with his son, he heard the news on a TV monitor at Dulles International Airport. The two had been staying in a campus dorm, "kind of out of communication," says Rainville, so the report came as a shock.
At first, business at Maple Landmark suffered as his dealers scurried to address the problem. Soon the same dealers were reaching to satisfy increased demands for US-made products, and Rainville saw sales of his varied line of games and toys – everything from wooden jeeps to school buses to police cars – "modestly rising."
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