MUKILTEO — Kurt Rumens is the fire king.
He’s built a small empire around stoves and fireplaces, an empire that resides in a 500,000-square-foot warehouse in Mukilteo, just a short drive from Paine Field.
Inside, there are hundreds of people designing, testing and assembling stoves and fireplaces — sold at retail stores in four countries. The forklifts crawl up and down rows of three-tiered industrial shelves, and merchandise moves down assembly lines, eventually ending up in tall cardboard boxes stacked three high near loading zones.
Rumens started Travis Industries in 1979. The company celebrated its 30th year in business last month, marking three decades of Rumens’ unconventional approach to designing gas, wood and pellet-burning stoves and fireplaces.
“If you go out to lunch with Kurt, you might end up at a high-end furniture store,” said national sales manager Perry Ranes, who has been with Travis Industries 27 years.
Those are the places where Rumens derives his ideas, the fodder that helped move wood stoves from hunting cabins to living rooms.
“It occurred to me 30 years ago, we had a chance to get in the front room of the house,” said Rumens.
He doesn’t look like a company president. He sports jeans and a black button-up shirt — and bandages from a motorcycle accident last month. There’s a buffalo head mounted on the wall of his office, and employees joke that the animal is often consulted during meetings.
“People ask me what’s my favorite stove,” Rumens said one day last week while taking a break from an engineering meeting. “I always say, ‘the next one.’”
A New York native, Rumens started out installing stoves in the Seattle area in the 1970s.
“That was back when fireplaces were just a big black hunk in the corner that emitted heat,” said marketing manager Stuart Hanson.
Now, Travis Industries employs between 400 and 450 people. The company is on track to sell 80,000 appliances this year.
There are fireplaces lit with soft lights even when there’s no fire, inspired by kitchen ovens. There are small, ornate wall units that are popular for bedrooms and bathrooms.
Travis Industries manufactures several brands of stoves and gas fireplaces: Lopi, Avalon, Fireplace Xtrordinair and the outdoor Tempest Torch. They’re sold in retail stores across the United States, Canada and Australia — never big-box stores like the Home Depot or Lowe’s, where installation would be a do-it-yourself job.
The company is in the process of expanding distribution to China.
Rising oil prices meant 2008 was a banner year for the company, with demand soaring as homeowners looked for alternative ways to heat their houses.
Recession meant cutbacks in 2009, with the company’s work force slashed by the equivalent of a few hundred workers. In an attempt to stave off a brain-drain by laying off experienced employees, Travis Industries implemented a job-share program, where workers came in a few days a week and collected unemployment from the state for days they didn’t work.
Over the last several months, workers started returning to work full-time as demand picked back up.
In the lobby of the company’s “House of Fire” headquarters in Mukilteo, there’s a poster showing two lines of employees — one in 1988, the other in 2008.
They’re the same people, just 20 years older.
The company boasts low turnover, with a handful of workers who have been with Travis since the beginning.
Rumens said this of his empire: “It’s really not my story — it’s the story of 100 men and women. It really is the story of the ingenuity of a bunch of people.”
Read Amy Rolph’s small-business blog at www.heraldnet.com/TheStorefront. Contact her at 425-339-3029 or arolph@heraldnet.com.
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