Made in the U.S.A.: Company's vintage signs get national exposure
Loyd and Laura Meissenburg surrounded by signs they have made on Friday morning at their office in Bigfork.
Two new signs sit off to the side in the production area of Meissenburg Designs on Friday morning in Bigfork. The production area sends out between 250 and 300 signs per day on average with higher numbers going through during the holiday seasons.
Brent Larsen working in production on Friday morning at Meissenburg Designs in Bigfork.
Meissenburg Designs makes vintage wood signs in a rather low-profile manner off the beaten path near Bigfork, but a recent episode of ABC World News’ “Made in America” series put the small company in the national limelight.
Three of Meissenburg Designs’ decorative signs from its Matchbook Series were used to redecorate a Dallas home with American-made products.
“We’ve gotten a flurry of inquiries,” said Laura Meissenburg, who with her husband, Loyd, own Meissenburg Designs. “The website is up 300 percent.”
During the ABC segment, three rooms of a Dallas home were stripped of everything that wasn’t made in America to make a point about how imports have taken over everyday life in America. The homeowners were sure at least half of their furnishings were domestic products, but in the end all that was left were the American-made sink and a glass vase.
As part of the new series, ABC took on the challenge of trying to fill three rooms in the home with 100 percent American-made products.
“A lot of things were found to be cheaper in the U.S.,” Laura Meissenburg said about ABC’s effort to refurnish the home with made-in-America products.
In the end, the only item that could not be found in this country was a coffee maker.
“All of us need to be more aware of how many jobs it would create” if Americans were more conscious about what they buy, she said.
In a virtual photo tour of the Dallas home on the ABC website, viewers can click on the Meissenburg decorative signs in the kitchen, where the question is posed: What does buying American mean to Meissenburg Designs?
The company’s response is that for every $20,000 increase in sales per month, it would be able to create three jobs.
And, Laura added, if each household bought just $60 worth of U.S. goods a year, that would translate into 200,000 jobs.
With more than 3,000 accounts nationwide and in France, Spain and Mexico, Meissenburg Designs is a hopping small business in Bigfork. The wholesale sign manufacturing company employs 33 people who work in two shifts.
On any given day, up to 500 units are shipped out of the facility that’s tucked behind a small strip mall on Montana 35. They’ve been in the building for a decade and space is “maxed out,” she said.
The company took a hit during the recession like most other small businesses, but managed to keep the entire work force in place by having employees take Fridays off for a couple of months.
“I didn’t want to be in the situation where if it came back we weren’t ready for it,” Laura said. “If you’re retraining 20 people you can’t jump back in, but your competitor will.”
The Meissenburgs looked for other venues and marketing opportunities during the lean times and found a niche in the fairly recession-proof liquor industry. The result was several new accounts.
Using the number of orders coming in as an economic indicator, it looks as if Meissenburg Designs has weathered the storm. Laura also owns Electric Avenue Gifts and said business is looking up there, too.
“The last quarter for both [businesses] was good,” she said. “The first quarter for the sign business has been phenomenal. I don’t think we’ve had this much on order since 2007.”
On the horizon for 2012 are contracts with some of the nation’s biggest corporations, another encouraging sign of a rebounding economy.
“A lot of companies are getting pressure to find American-made goods,” Laura noted.
THE MEISSENBURGS, married for 33 years, met in a cartooning class at the University of California-Irvine, so eventually crafting a career around artwork was a natural evolution. The couple moved to Bigfork in the early 1980s after selling their garment business in Los Angeles.
“Loyd was going to retire; that lasted a week,” she recalled.
She went to work for Electric Avenue Gifts in 1983 and bought the business two years later. About the same time Laura’s father, decoy duck carver Tom Taber, wanted a two-dimensional outdoor sign featuring a half decoy. Tabor bet Loyd he couldn’t come up with a weather-resistant resin.
Resin signs at the time were touted as weather-resistant but typically cracked during Montana’s harsh winters.
The challenge involved a lot of tinkering, with “thousands of tweakings. The whole house stunk. He was the chemist from hell,” Laura recalled with a laugh.
Loyd eventually developed workable fillers so the resin could expand and created his first genuine outdoor casted sign. The Meissenburgs employed a young local sculptor, Eric Thorsen, and manufactured signs until the resin-casting business was transferred to Marc and Eric Pierce at Big Sky Carvers.
The next evolution of the business was Loyd’s idea to create wood slat-board signs for Electric Avenue Gifts. That led to making vintage-looking signs for Whitefish Mountain Resort.
“The inks were terrible, they’d fade, but they sold like hotcakes,” Laura said about the first generation of signs. “We’re now in our third generation of printer. Over time, the machines caught up to what we were doing.”
With updated equipment came the ability to make the signs fade-resistant.
Big Sky Carvers began selling the vintage signs, too, and were the sole distributor of Meissenburg Designs for many years.
When Big Sky Carvers was sold in the late 1990s, the Meissenburgs made the decision to sell the signs themselves and haven’t looked back.
Their colorful signs are reminiscent of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Stacks of magazines from that era attest to the couple’s attention to detail and investment in art. Some artwork is in the public domain; other pieces have to be licensed from various publishers.
The sign repertoire has expanded through the years to include tavern, Western, water-skiing and all sorts of other subject matter. Plum Creek Timber Co. supplies local wood for the signs, which include barrel-end designs and cut-outs along with more conventional rectangular signs.
The company also makes metal signs and last year added retro vinyl indoor/outdoor pillows to the product line.
Meissenburg Designs has permanent showrooms in Las Vegas, Atlanta and Seattle.
In the Flathead Valley, their signs can be purchased at Electric Avenue Gifts in Bigfork, Bear Mountain Mercantile in Whitefish, Twist in Missoula, Western Outdoor in Kalispell, Polson Hallmark in Polson and Mountain Gift Shop in Eureka.
On the Web:
meissenburgdesigns.com
Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.