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Founded in Hickory, North Carolina, in 1958, King Hickory is a familyowned company that manufactures high-quality, upholstered fabric and leather furniture. The company is world renowned for its solid frames, master craftsmanship, and 8-way hand-tied construction. With a focus on creating furniture of the highest standards, King Hickory has always worked with ����AV to find new ways to produce their merchandise faster with more precision and handle everything from development all the way through to final production.

The challenge facing King Hickory was how to keep pace with innovations in furniture manufacturing in order to streamline their processes for faster production while maintaining the high-quality standards that their customers have come to expect. They also wanted to improve craftsmanship and better match tough patterns like chevrons, accelerate order handling while increasing fabric yield, and overall, better manage supply chain costs.

"It is truly night and day from hand cutting to complete and full digital cutting – hands down, it has really accelerated how we process our furniture."

John Palmer, King Hickory President

In order to protect their bottom line, create a more automated flow, standardize and maintain excellence along with better managing difficult pattern repeats and matching, King Hickory looked to the Furniture On Demand solution. To answer their objectives, they chose an offer that included the material library, nesting in the cloud, and a digital production platform. Also, King Hickory wanted to ensure that the way they produced furniture would be at the highest level with the integration of the most advanced industry 4.0 technology.

The Furniture On Demand by ����AV combined with Formaris pattern-making software really helped King Hickory to improve their throughput of matched fabrics. By nesting in the cloud, they were able to get rid of nesting as a separate task and speed up the machine management, and accelerate throughput.

An added benefit was the ability to quickly process hard-to-match fabrics like chevrons. With the Furniture On Demand, they were able to process matched fabrics as quickly as plain fabrics.

With ����AV’s expertise and support, King Hickory looked at new ways to re-work their workflow and to digitalize and enhance their process. With the combination of ����AV’s most advanced digital solution, Furniture On Demand by ����AV, they were able to add more precision and excellence to their products.

“Installation of the Furniture On Demand was very seamless” stated Carla Chastain, Lead ����AV CAD Operations.

King Hickory and ����AV’s partnership began in 1997 with the use of ����AV cutting, pattern matching, nesting, and product development solutions. Since that time, King Hickory and ����AV have worked collaboratively to find new ways to push performance and take advantage of digital technologies.

Furniture On Demand’s flexibility has helped King Hickory improve its manufacturing processes on multiple levels. It enables them to standardize quality by centralizing processes, therefore, reducing reliance on operator skill level

“We were looking for more automated efficiency, accuracy, and labor savings. It is really hard to find people and hand cutting is a dying skill. We can no longer get the level of labor that we need to manage our manufacturing efficiently.” Keith Hart, VP of Sales & Marketing

King Hickory has been able to shorten production time by automating labor-intensive and prone to human-error processes, like pattern preparation, marker making, and cutting execution to help overcome staffing shortages and free-up available employees to focus on more activities requiring expertise and experience.

King Hickory benefits from ����AV’s digital imaging technology to verify and validate fabric patterns on small-scale or complex motifs, like herringbone, to ensure that all endpoints align together when assembling the final item.

"Without ����AV, we could not offer the level and variety of custom furniture that King Hickory is known for. ����AV‘s digitalization of our patterns and our production process has really allowed us to have one of the largest selections of custom upholstery in the furniture industry” John Palmer, President

King Hickory Furniture is a family-owned company. They began manufacturing in 1958 in Hickory, North Carolina. For over 50 years, they have proudly provided the highest grade, upholstered fabric and leather furniture to the consumer.

Furniture On Demand by ����AV comprises ����AV’s Digital Cutting Platform and single-ply fabric cutting solution Virga. It’s a turnkey solution that automates on-demand production right from order reception to cut piece. This disruptive offer gives furniture companies a 360°-view of the entire On-Demand process from small series to one-off production runs.