How Reality TV Led This Custom Shop to its First CNC Machine
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  While many people  recognize him as a contestant on HGTV’s “Ellen’s Design Challenge,” furniture maker Tim McClellan, owner of Western Heritage Furniture in Jerome, AZ, was already  well established before the show. He has been crafting high-end furniture pieces for more than 20 years. 

But it was his recent stint on the Ellen DeGeneres-hosted show that allowed him to come to a realization about himself, namely, that he is a storyteller as well as a furniture maker. And he learned that he needed a CNC.

“What I discovered on the show was that I’m a designer and a craftsman and a storyteller,” McClellan says. Tim 1.0 was the just the designer and builder, but Tim 2.0 embraces all aspects of the craft, especially the story, he adds.

And what a story he has to tell. Not only about the rustic furniture he builds from reclaimed “ghost wood” in the small, hillside, former mining town of Jerome, which is located nearly 2 hours north of Phoenix, AZ, but also his journey as a participant in the reality TV show. The final stages of his journey on “Ellen’s Design Challenge” took McClellan to the height of success to the brink of controversy to another open door in less than 24 hours.

“It was quite an extraordinary journey,” he says. “And in the end a very challenging and painful event happened in my disqualification.”

After being named the winner of the competition, which filmed the first three weeks of November 2014 and aired earlier this year, the morning after the announcement McClellan found out he was disqualified because his final, winning design was very similar in style to that of a European designer. 

What happened next epitomizes his ability to take challenges, like his disqualification, and turn them into successes. And he has had plenty of practice of making the most of difficult situations, namely with taking Western Heritage from a small one-man shop and developing it into 32-man company, at its peak, that ships products globally from a logistically challenged location where the lack of shipping and material resources would have caused most businesses to shutter their doors ages ago.

After his disqualification, McClellan says he was blown away by the amount of support he received from viewers. “The next morning that [disqualification] turned into a very fantastic, unbelievable thing where 90-some-odd percent of the viewers sided with me and backed me,” he says. Many people took to social media voicing their outrage and even a bloggist from “The Washington Post” chimed in on the popular discourse saying what had happened to him was unfair.

However, not only did McClellan discover during his time on the show that he had built a large and supportive fan base ¬ many of whom were inspired to pursue their own call to woodworking but DeGeneres also later announced that she wanted to work with him on his own TV show. He is currently in negotiations for a series that would air on HGTV this fall.

“The idea is to be able to continue to inspire masses and masses of people with the stories and the builds that I do,” McClellan says. “This is such a wonderful opportunity…to be able to be in front of the camera and to reach out and to touch millions of people and give them the little push they need to go in the garage and start making something.”

It Started With a Bed and Weyerhaeuser Log

McClellan describes himself as a self-taught woodworker, and his foray into the field started many years ago when he lived in Everett, WA.

“I had a girlfriend and she wanted a log bed,” he remembers. “So I went out into the woods…Weyerhaeuser back then used to do a bit of slash and burn in certain parts of their forests. They would cut down everything in order to harvest the bigger trees and then burn the waste wood, the smaller trees. They don’t do that anymore, of course. So, I went and just borrowed some of the slash and burn piles.”

After making the bed for his girlfriend out of the Weyerhaeuser wood waste, he started making others and eventually started a log furniture company in Seattle, WA, around 1991. But a few years later he moved to Arizona, a state not as flushed with good forestland as Washington. With the scarce availability of logs, his log furniture business soon ended.

However, McClellan had moved into an old ghost town that was once inhabited by frontiersmen and miners. This new location, once known as “The Wickedest City in the West” opened up a whole new avenue of source material that included an incredible backstory.

“There were all of these old buildings that were being taken down because of the fire hazards. We’re in a mountain town and if a building catches fire it runs up and burns the whole town down,” he explains.

Seeing another opportunity, McClellan quickly took advantage. “They were doing a major clean up, trying to get these old, abandoned buildings removed from town, so I had access to what I called ‘ghost wood.’ With the ghosts of the pioneers who built this town and built this country and the ghosts of the forests that the trees were harvested from…well, there is just a whole story behind the ghost concept.” 

McClellan started Western Heritage Furniture in 1994 with the goal of taking the salvaged barnwood and began making high-end furniture out of it. The appeal of the product was not only enhanced by the character of the reclaimed wood but the story behind it as well. 

“I started the Ghostwood line and it just went crazy,” he says. “I had to hire people. I literally went from a one-man shop to hiring 32 people over a short period of time as we grew the company. I had every challenge you could ever imagine, going from a one-man show designing furniture to a 32-man crew delivering furniture to 32 of the lower 48 states and three Canadian provinces and Belgium and Panama.” 

Many of those challenges included managing new people, putting together a human resource department, dealing with OSHA regulations and purchasing new equipment.

“Just all of the heartache and headache of running a business,” he says. “And I got consumed with the business aspect of it and was no longer doing what I started and what I loved, which was creating cool stuff with my hands.”

By 2007 Western Heritage had become the largest employer in a town with a population of approximately 400 people. So McClellan decided to take on a business partner, Tim McCune, to help manage the business. That move allowed him to concentrate on what he loved doing most: design.

Not Just an Ordinary Woodshop

Western Heritage’s 8,000-square-foot plant is the former high school gym. Visual remnants of the previous occupants still appear, from the maple hardwood floors to the mascot painted on the walls.

The shop has standard woodworking equipment: table saws, panel saws, chop saws, shapers, a straight-line ripsaw and much more. But it didn’t have a CNC because the challenge of getting one up the hill and into the small shop was too great, McClellan says.

“We couldn’t fit a CNC machine in the doors of our building,” he explains, “because it’s an old high school gym from the 1930s. We faced a lot of challenges, and I look back now and say, ‘Wow, we did it in exactly the wrong place.’ There are no labor resources when there are only 400 people in the town. And there is no Home Depot anywhere near us. Just getting materials and finding labor, dealing with shipping was extraordinarily challenging on every front. This is why it wasn’t a smart move, but as far as an adventure goes, it was quite a ride.”

So McClellan says that he designed the furniture so that it could be easily hand crafted at stations using basic woodworking equipment.

“And so that was a great exercise in design and what I ended up coming up with was a very unusual technique, in the furniture world. I do casegoods with the carcass inside the exterior carcass with double layers,” he says. “Also, I did a lot of almost-like-cabinetry-style stuff where you put panels on the cases. And of course the barnwood is weak or not super strong so I firm it up by putting it onto a sheetgood.

“I found myself just working through the process of designing furniture around not having a CNC and around barnwood, which is different with every barn you get,” McClellan continues. “The consistency is not there. So coming up with ways to have a very solid, well-built, heirloom-quality piece of furniture consistently looking good to all of the customers for the last 15 years has been an exercise for me and a great way to learn and grow.

And I feel like I contributed greatly to my ability on the Ellen show because of the unique challenges I found myself or put myself into here in Jerome. It put me in a place where I can really think outside of the box and come up with creative and alternative ways to build things.”

Although his business experience had an impact on how he competed on “Ellen’s Design Challenge,” the show also had an impact on Western Heritage Furniture. For the first time during filming, McClellan worked on a CNC machine. Although skeptical at first, using the automated technology helped him to cut down a sofa project that had been scaled 22 percent too large. “So, I ended up having to cut the couch in half right on TV and shrink it down,” he explains. “But it was still scaled 22 percent too large everywhere else. But, I was able to get it down to the 78-inch width required to stay alive in the competition. That was my experience with the CNC, and we are getting one now,” he laughs.

As a matter of fact the company is getting a Biesse Rover J. A MEP grant from the state of Arizona is picking up half the cost of the machine, making it a deal he couldn’t refuse. As for fitting it into his plant, McClellan says, “now-a-days [CNCs] have come a long way since I first started. The big heavy machines are still available, but there are a lot of these that you can break down and fit in our door. We will put the bed in vertically through the front doors and then be able to put it back on the ground and attach the arm back on it.”

And thinking outside of the box also has certainly allowed the company to contain costs when it comes to shipping and their order management system.

No semi trucks can come up the hill so everything has to be shipped out with short trucks. But they have developed an answer to their shipping challenges.

“We developed our own shipping company,” McClellan says. “We blanket wrap our super high-dollar furniture and ship it all over the Rocky Mountains. And in the process my brother and I started…we run diesel trucks with trailers and we started our own biodiesel company, making our own fuel out of waste and vegetable oil during the spike in fuel costs when diesel was running $4 to $4.50 a gallon. We just started making our own trying to offset some of the cost. It’s a whole other story about adapting and making a way and my brother still delivers. He just got back from delivering an expanding round table to Florida that’s going on a 250-foot yacht. [Although] it was built in 2010 and they stripped the interior because it was getting old and they are refurbishing all brand new here five years later. Our table is going in that yacht and the other one is going up to Connecticut. So he took them out here and went up to Florida to drop one off and then he went up to Connecticut and these are $30,000 tables each one of them.”

McClellan says for that for overseas deliveries, typically they will land a container at the plant, a 20-foot box, and they fill that container and pack and then load it on a bobtail and take it down the hill. “But that's once or twice a year,” he adds. “That is not our main thing. Our main thing is one-off, super high-end and my brother does all of the deliveries of that. It's a bit of a family business. I hired my other younger brother who is our media guy and photographer and my nephew who is our tech guy and developed a software system that is cutting edge and wonderful.”

That software program is the other piece of the puzzle that has made Western Heritage successful. David McClellan, Tim’s nephew, who used to create software programs for Fortune 500 companies before coming to Jerome to work in the family business, created proprietary software for Western Heritage that tracks orders from conception to production to delivery and installation.

“It is an end-to-end system and it allows us to reduce our overhead significantly,” he says. “I feel like we have a competitive advantage for being so small. I really don't know too many other companies that have the ability to create software for whatever they need to do and exactly what they need to do. We created this to accommodate our exact process. So we weren't trying to take a piece of software built for some other larger company and make it work for us. We created something that is exactly what we needed. And immediately we were able to realize efficiencies through using the software. Now-a-days we continually build upon it to solve problems and to speed things up. If they need a button that needs to do x,y,z we can respond to that immediately and by the next week that is now part of the system.”

Every shop worker has a tablet at his station and they can track what they are working on as well as view all communication with the client as well as change orders. The system also tracks inventory and automatically reduces supplies when a project is completed. They are also alerted when it is time to reorder supplies. “Not only does it alert us it also prints out a purchase order that we can fax to vendors,” David adds.

All of this innovation was born of necessity and dealing with the challenges owning and operating a business in a remote location.

“I never really planned on being an international businessman,” Tim McClellan says. “I just wanted to build cool stuff with my hands, really.” The same can probably be said of being a TV host but as with everything else he has faced and in the true spirit of Western pioneers before him, McClellan not only continues to rise to meet every challenge but makes the most of every opportunity he encounters as well.

 


Editor's Note: An edited verision of this article appears in the May 2015 issue of Woodworking Network magazine.

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