When Meganne Wecker graduated from Purdue University in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in business management, international business and Spanish, she envisioned a jet-setting career working with companies around the world.
But once she began interviewing with consulting firms, it quickly became clear they weren’t willing to send a new grad much further than Kansas City, she recalls with a chuckle.
It was then she realized that the best way to satisfy her wanderlust would be to join Skyline Furniture Mfg., the Chicago-based upholstered furniture company her grandfather, Norm, had founded in 1946 and that her father, Ted, was leading.
At that time, Ted was importing goods from Mexico. He invited his daughter to join him at a Guadalajara trade show and suggested she join the business.
Growing up, she recalls, there had been no parental pressure to go into the family enterprise, in part because manufacturing furniture in the United States was a tough business. But, by the time she finished college, the import division of Skyline that her father had started was thriving. Wecker spent her first few years at Skyline traveling the world to visit suppliers.
Eventually, however, she found her true calling on the manufacturing side.
From catalogs to e-commerce
As Wecker began learning more about fabrics, textiles and design, she began to gravitate toward that aspect of the business.
Ted eventually put Wecker in charge of the manufacturing division, recognizing an opportunity to let his daughter flex her creativity and learn leadership skills in what, at the time, was a relatively low-stakes environment.
“It was such a small [aspect of the] business that my dad was like, ‘Go ahead, plan it, do whatever you want to do,’” Wecker says. “And so, I took on the idea of designing furniture that I would want to put in my first apartment.”
She imbued those designs with elements gleaned from her love of fashion, and she approached the business through the lens of a young shopper — a perspective that turned out to be fortuitously timed with the rise of e-commerce in the early 2000s.
However, the foundation for Skyline’s eventual success in online retail was set generations earlier.
In the company’s early years, it supplied furniture to catalog retailers, including Montgomery Ward, JCPenney, Sears and Spiegel.
Fast-forward several decades, Wecker says, and “some of those catalogs were the first to go into e-commerce when e-com started.”
“Now it’s been 20 years, but I would say we had 10 years of just rapid growth because e-commerce was a channel that no one really understood and no one was really paying attention to,” Wecker says. “And so, we just learned and grew as those guys were learning and growing, too. It was a huge opportunity for us.”
Finding the ‘sweet spot‘
While the e-commerce boom was exciting, Wecker also understood that the pace of growth wasn’t sustainable.
About 10 years ago, Wecker took the reins as president and chief creative officer. Wecker’s husband, Trent Steed, who joined the company in 2013, serves as executive vice president. Ted is CEO but has taken on more of an advisory role in recent years, using his experience and expertise to train teams as the company continues to expand, Wecker says.
Under her watch, the company has eschewed external funding and prioritized profitability over pedal-to-the-metal expansion. Wecker has seen friends in the furniture industry lose their businesses after becoming overleveraged.
“I’ve learned that fast growth is really hard and no growth is really hard,” she says. “So, there’s this little sweet spot of taking opportunities, but making sure that it’s something that your team and the company can withstand on its own.”
Still, Wecker and the company aren’t afraid to think big.
Custom solutions
In October 2016, Wecker launched Skyline’s sister brand, Cloth & Company, which uses in-house digital printing to design and create custom home decor that can be delivered directly to customers within three weeks, eliminating the need to import fabrics or to order more than is actually needed. Fast-fashion retailers like Zara and H&M have built their businesses on the same technology, she says.
Custom printing has also allowed the company to create exclusive products for retailers. This has allowed Skyline to preserve its profit margins and extract itself from what Wecker describes as a “race to the bottom” in which companies sell the same product to multiple retailers who then compete to sell it faster and cheaper.
Wecker credits her father and the culture he helped foster at Skyline with influencing her approach of balancing entrepreneurship with steady growth and innovation with risk management.
“It’s not always going to be easy, but you try it and also build in the flexibility to be able to pivot if it isn’t working right.”