Usually, Charter Furniture’s Siler City plant is hard at work with their employees producing the high-end furniture that decorates lobbies of well-known hotel brands across the country. Now, as it does for so many others, everything looks a little different.
To keep their employees safe, Charter Furniture is in daily direct contact with their corporate offices to get the best guidance. They have safety protocols in place for their office and manufacturing areas, offering sanitizing stations, monitoring employee temperatures and providing facemasks for employees and their families.
“The whole leadership team has made this place safer,” Lorenzo Mendoza, Senior Vice President of Operations and Continuous Improvement at Brown Jordan, the parent organization of Charter Furniture, said. “We are going through a daily monitoring of employee’s temperatures, and this must be a bit uncomfortable for them, but we are mostly offering our employees respect. It is something we do just because we want to keep them at work and we want to protect them.”
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Charter Furniture was faced with tough questions about how they would be able to continue operating. They decided to pivot their operations and put their employees to work on something a little different from furniture: personal protective equipment.
Because of their familiarity in working with fabric for their furniture production, Charter has heeded the call to make cloth face coverings. Their efforts have not gone unnoticed. The Chatham County Public Health Department placed an order for masks with Charter Furniture, as well as fellow Siler City business and essential food manufacturer, Brookwood Farms.
Now, thanks to Charter Furniture, those that working on the front lines and working to keep the community fed are better protected.
“Under the direction of our great leadership team, and with the scarcity of masks in this pandemic, it was logical for us to decide to make masks to keep them safe,” said Mendoza.
The next step for Charter Furniture is evaluating what it would take to get their products certified so that they can contribute even further, as well as researching how they can get involved in making other pieces of personal protective equipment.
As Charter Furniture looks to the future, a backlog of orders from before coronavirus struck will be keeping them busy. They are hopeful that the summer will bring some normalcy back to their suppliers and customers to allow them to pick back up right where they left off.
Interested in ordering cloth face coverings from Charter Furniture? Visit charterfurniture.com or contact Lorenzo Mendoza at lmendoza@brownjordan.com or at 336-622-2201 ext. 20126. There is a 25 piece minimum for orders.
