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Like many companies, Closet Works started from meager beginnings. In 1987 without an installation van, Mike Carson, owner of the Elmhurst, Ill.-based company, carried the panels and shelves for his first job from the basement of his Chicago home down the alley to the client, says Kristina Ferrigan, marketing director for Closet Works.
Carson used the profits from that first job to buy an installation van. "We started in my basement, and I guess the key is we grew without any capital and we grew by my doing every job," Carson says.
Everything Closet Works makes is design made to order. "Our closets are going to be more like snowflakes," Ferrigan says. "There are no two that are quite the same."
Ferrigan says that since a closet is such a custom space in a home, it is rare to ever find two identical closets. This is true even in condominiums where the floor plans are the same in each unit, she explains.
"The chance that you're going to get two of those closets to be exactly the same is still very slim," she says. "The walls could be off by an inch or two. Obviously the homeowner is a different person with different needs. So where theoretically somebody could say, 'I want the exact same thing,' once we're done consulting with them and really making a strong assessment of their needs the likelihood that they would wind up with a duplicate of anything that's out there is very slim."
Making it happen with software
Although the designers at Closet Works still do much of their designing by hand before turning it over to the engineering department, software integration has been integral to the company's process of designing and manufacturing.
"About 10 to 12 years ago we finally got to where we started using the Cabinet Vision, and that was mostly for the formalization of the process," Ferrigan says. "It was kind of our midpoint. We would get it and we would have hand-sketched drawings from our designers turned in to the engineering department where they would create the finished product and put it back to the client for presentation approval."
