Q&A with Chad Nord on Indiana Furniture’s Mira Award nomination
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Jasper-based Indiana Furniture is in the running for the Conexus Indiana Manufacturing Innovation Award at this year’s TechPoint Mira Awards. The winners will be announced during a gala honoring the best in tech in Indiana at The Palladium in Carmel on Feb. 27.
Vice President of Operations Chad Nord spoke with Inside INdiana Business about the company’s longevity and the project behind the nomination.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about Indiana Furniture and its products.
In March, we’re going to have our 120th birthday. So we’ve been around for a little while, and the whole time, we’ve been making furniture, specifically wood furniture, mostly for the contract office market.
In today’s terms, we’re making desks, bookcases, hutches. But it’s transitioned over the last decade. For instance, I’m standing at my desk right now because my work surface goes up and down. We make desk chairs, guest chairs and lounge furniture that looks and feels more like it should be in your living room, but it’s made to commercial standards, so much better quality. Pretty much anything you would need for the modern-day office, we make it in Jasper.
What makes Indiana Furniture unique vs. its competitors?
The reason people come to us is because they trust us. We’re not the cheapest; we don’t make the fanciest things, but we take care of people. When we tell someone we’re going to do something, we do it.
That’s the big differentiator in that our customers trust us, they know us by name and they know if we say we’re going to do something, they can bank on that. And if something does go wrong, because nothing’s ever perfect, we’re going to take care of it, and they don’t have to worry about that.
What challenges has the business faced over the years?
It’s constant evolution to be able to survive this long and not only survive but thrive. Most companies aren’t around a century, much less building the same kind of products for a century. We’ve been able to do that.
And we’ve only been able to do that by letting our products change to what customers want but also adopting new ways of doing things. That’s a lot of what we’ve been doing over the last couple of decades, but we’ve tried to accelerate over the last five years.
What successes has the company celebrated over the years?
The big successes most recently have been consolidating down to one manufacturing site. When I joined the company seven years ago, we had four manufacturing facilities spread throughout Dubois County. In the last three years, we’ve exited two buildings: one that was the original building from 1906 that we were still manufacturing products in until two years ago and the other up in Dubois that was an acquisition in the 1930s that was over 100 years old.
Most of my peers brag about how many factories they have. My biggest accomplishment is consolidating down to one big factory instead. That lets us do what we need to do in technology adoption and automation for the future.
Why was the business nominated for the Conexus Indiana Manufacturing Innovation Award?
We’ve been a part of Conexus for a few years now. A lot of the team members have come to realize that we’re a little bit of an exception to some of the rules. We’re not a big company. We’re about 330 people right now, most all in Indiana, in this one site. But our adoption to and acceptance of new technology is much higher than what they would expect to see in other companies of our size—and especially companies of our age.
The wood furniture industry is not on the cutting edge of technology by any means, but we’re making big strides by adopting not only technology that’s new to everyone but also adopting technology that other industries have had and figuring out how to leverage it in the furniture industry.
The project case study that drove the nomination was our adoption and implementation of autonomous mobile robots that run around moving pallets of material. They’re little, but they hold up to 600kg.
Last year, our robots went over 2,000 miles in the facility moving material. We’re going to double the amount of work they do in 2025. We’ve already got those plans underway. We’ve just got to get the work done. Also, we’re moving forward not only with the mobile robot expansion but also we’ve got some more automated machining cells on the way that we’ll be implementing.
How does it feel to be a 2025 Mira Award nominee, and what are you looking forward to most at the gala?
It’s nice that our team has gotten some recognition for the things that we take for granted every single day. We’re humble in that we don’t know a different way than the way that we’re doing it. But to be selected and held up, that’s something special, it’s a nice accolade. And for the gala itself, it’ll be nice to be in the company of like-minded peers who have that same outlook.