WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Closet, remodeling, and home organization professionals looking to see the latest innovations in custom craftsmanship and high-volume automation will have a front-row seat this summer. Organizers of the 2026 Closets Conference & Expo have announced that Quest Engineering will host a featured virtual plant tour, offering an inside look at its 100,000-square-foot facility in Richfield, Wisconsin.

The virtual tour, scheduled for the opening day of the conference on June 30 at the Palm Beach Convention Center, will showcase how Quest leverages Plant 4.0 technology to process over 500 panels and 7,500 individual components daily. Attendees can view high-speed edgebanding, robotic sorting, and lights-out manufacturing in real time.

“We built this facility as a blank slate to design exactly what we wanted as a manufacturer,” said Chris Lefeber, co-founder of Quest Engineering. “Today, our entire plant is connected from the robotic storage that live-loads our machines to the sensors on our edgebanders that text our supervisors if a metric falls out of spec.”

One aspect of the tour is Quest’s approach to the closets and home organization market. By adopting European manufacturing standards, Quest has moved away from traditional North American methods to provide more sophisticated, pre-assembled solutions.

“We are very state-of-the-art for an American-based manufacturer,” Lefeber explained, adding that a lot of the company’s philosophy, materials, material concepts, and equipment are very European-based. “All the materials that we use are laminates, and that gives us what we call the best value proposition for our customers.” 

He also noted that European wardrobe cabinets are all part of their closet system, and the company’s pre-assembled solutions offer more efficiency on the job site. “To assemble a wardrobe cabinet onsite might take a traditional installer three hours; we can help them get it installed in half an hour. We do a lot of assembled products within our closet.”

Lefeber also said that features, like integrated lighting, are no longer one-offs but part of the automated flow, given how popular lighting is right now. “We do offer built-in lighting in a lot of our products, including vertical lit partitions in our closet [and wardrobe] system. It’s a great way to put a lot of glitz and glamour into a closet.”

Lights-out innovation 

The tour will also highlight the Biesse Winstore robotic system, which performs "chaotic panel management" to organize thousands of sheets of material without human intervention.

“If there's a panel that's on the bottom of one of these stacks, the robot will work ‘lights-out’ to dig that out overnight,” Lefeber said. “It makes sure it’s ready for the next day's process, so there is never a pause in production. We’re not waiting on somebody to make a decision; that decision is already made in the cloud.”

The 2026 Closets Conference & Expo will take place June 30 – July 2 in West Palm Beach, Florida. The event is co-located with Wood Pro Expo Florida and is the premier national event for the closets and home organization industry.

Register for the 2026 Closets Conference & Expo at woodworkingnetwork.com/events/closets-conference-expo.