Mitchell Gold+Bob Williams closure brought an abrupt end to company that changed furniture-making workplace

More than 400 workers in Taylorsville, North Carolina suddenly lost their jobs in late August when a furniture factory closed. It's not the only manufacturing loss for a state known for its furniture industry and craftsmanship.

The layoffs happened without warning: A Saturday email announcing the immediate closure of the Mitchell Gold+Bob Williams factory. And suddenly, all of its workers were without jobs, and an entire county was in scramble mode.

Soon after, David Icenhour walks among the booths at the job fair he organized in a gym at East Taylorsville Baptist Church.

“We were blindsided by the closure like all employees were as well," he says.

Icenhour is the economic development director for Alexander County. There are about 40 potential employers at the fair, but not nearly enough to absorb the hundreds of lost jobs caused by the closure.

“This is by far the largest job fair we’ve seen in this county, and I’ve been here over 20 years, because it’s one of the largest needs I’ve seen,” he says.

Longtime Mitchell Gold+Bob Williams employee Julie Barnes says workers were told at a company town hall meeting over the summer that the parent company was investing $20 million and that everything was fine.

“We were on the upside of it. We were ready to thrive," she says. "And this was really a complete shock, because we were thriving.

Julie Barnes’ father drove a truck for a furniture company for 25 years. She and her husband Mickey have combined more than 35 years with Mitchell Gold+Bob Williams and had hoped to retire there. 

This isn’t the first wave of massive layoffs in the industry. Many domestic companies began offshoring their manufacturing work in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Kimberly Smith was part of that wave. She had worked for more than a decade in a factory in Thomasville when that plant closed about 15 years ago.

She was also among those let go by Mitchell Gold+Bob Williams last month. This time was worse because there was no warning, she says.

“I felt like it was very, very, very upsetting for everybody for how we was done," Smith says. "I didn’t think it was right.”

Mitchell Gold, the co-founder, says he didn’t want things to end the way they did.

“I was shocked," he says. "When it came down to it at the end of August I was in disbelief that this was happening – this baby of mine.”

Blame the pandemic. A fluke surge in the industry. Buyers revamped their homes into remote offices or remodeled.

It wasn’t sustainable. Production ramped up but sales went flat after the initial spike. Inventories became bloated. Mitchell Gold+Bob Williams was not spared from the oversupply.

“That became a cashflow drain,” Gold says.

Gold retired in the summer before the pandemic. That’s when the company had about $34 million in inventory.

“By the time I got back in April of 2023 — $72 million," he says. "And the business hadn't doubled. So that was a problem.”

Then the bank stopped funding the company.

The Arkansas-based Stephens Group bought a majority stake in the business in 2015. Gold retained a seat on the board.

Closure marked the end for a company that created a trend in the factory workplace, says Richard Eller, author of Well-Crafted: The History of Furniture Manufacturing in Western North Carolina, which started here in the 1890s. 

Eller says when Mitchell Gold got into the business about 100 years later, he brought a social consciousness not seen in other companies.

“For the vast majority of its history, furniture making was a dirty job," he says. "And people accepted that fact. Mitchell Gold didn’t accept that. And if you look at where furniture stands now, in a lot of ways he led that revolution.”

They set up their business in Taylorsville, a township of just over 2,000 people in the shadows of the Brushy Mountains and its bountiful apple orchards.

Gold and Williams added air conditioning to their factory, a rare move in the furniture industry. They offered workers an onsite daycare, a health clinic and made their company a safe space for LGBTQ people.

“All of those things just evolved," Gold says. "Bob and I wanted to have a place. As we said, when people drove by, they would say, ‘That's where I want to work.’”

And it was a good place to work, says Julie Barnes. Now at the job fair, she frets about finding insurance for her family. There are some prospects, but many would create hardships she didn’t have at Mitchell Gold+Bob Williams.

“A lot of jobs are out of town where we’re used to driving 10 minutes to work," she says. "We’re gonna have to drive 30, 45 to an hour to go to work. And with a child that’s hard to do.”

There are plenty of other manufacturing job offers at this fair. But the Mitchell Gold workers aren’t the only ones looking.

In August, another regional furniture manufacturer, Klaussner Home Furnishings, also suddenly closed, putting more than 800 people out of work.