When people think about the history of Kimball International and how the company was founded, the first thought for most is pianos. However, the company started by producing television cabinets. The founder of Kimball International, which was started as the Jasper Corporation, Arnold Habig, saw television’s potential and realized by making these cabinets, they could secure relationships with leading manufacturers such as RCA, Zenith, and Magnavox. Early in the life of the company, when a production bottleneck occurred in the sanding department during one crucial order, every office employee, including management, stayed until 10:00 p.m. sanding cabinets. “We sold customers on the idea we could produce any kind of cabinet they wanted and make it with exceptional quality“, said Habig.
Habig attracted the best talent in the area by offering experienced woodworkers benefits such as major medical insurance, an incentive pay system, year-end bonuses, profit sharing retirement plan, a scholarship program for children of employees, and annual family picnics and Christmas parties. These types of benefits were not common in the 1950’s and Habig was an innovation entrepreneur with a firm belief that if you take care of your employees, they will take care of the customer. He eliminated punch clocks and instilled a culture of trust. All these employee incentives were introduced because Habig believed that no matter how much brick and mortar a business had, “if you do not have the personnel, you can’t make a success of it.” He added that employees were entitled to “share in the financial success of the company.”
By the early 1950s the Jasper Corporation produced more than 300,000 cable-model cabinets for one account alone and had grown to 250 employees. Three years later there were 463 workers on the payroll and annual sales had grown to $403,000. Herbert E. Thyen, a business associate of Habig ‘s and later Kimball International’s executive vice president and secretary, noted that Habig was a true visionary and had the foresight to look at every decision for its consequences fifteen to twenty years in the future. Habig possessed the ability, Thyen said, to direct and motivate people, combined with the skill to judge them accurately and fairly.
Throughout his career, Habig trusted in the business principle of vertical integration – having a self-sufficient organization within the organization itself (“from the forest to the home” became a company slogan) and avoiding being too dependent on 3rd party suppliers. To avoid the latter, the Jasper Corporation expanded its reach, purchasing such companies as the Borden Cabinet Corporation in Borden, Indiana, and the Evansville Veneer and Lumber Company, and expanding in later years to include sawmills and a fleet of tractors and semitrailers to deliver finished products. Over time this vertical integration strategy evolved to a virtual integration strategy and the company exited the raw materials businesses.
In June 1959, the Jasper Corporation bought the one of the country’s leading piano makers, W. W Kimball Company of Chicago, which Habig resurrected from near financial ruin. Although the firm had been making pianos for more than a century, it had fallen on hard times, as it had been saddled with a declining market share and an unprofitable new factory that had cost approximately $2 million to build. Habig failed to be dissuaded by critics who wondered how “a bunch of box-makers” could produce a piano. Since 80 percent of a piano consisted of wood materials, Habig reasoned that producing such a product seemed only natural for the Jasper Corporation. And while Kimball piano sales had been static for many years, Habig felt buying the company was a risk worth taking. “Many people thought we were stupid to take over what they considered a dead horse in an industry that had been static for many years,” he said. “But we could see that increased leisure time for the American people was just around the corner and that this would offer an opportunity to enlarge the piano market.”
Many of the W.W. Kimball employees did not want to leave the Chicago area to work in the new 70.000- square-foot factory built in October 1961 at West Baden, Indiana, so in order to gain the expertise of producing high-quality pianos, Jasper Corporation officials visited several prominent piano manufacturers in Europe, including the Bosendorfer Company in Vienna, Austria, which had been building concert grand pianos since 1828. “The people at Bosendorfer couldn’t have been more kind and helpful,” said Habig. “What we learned from them greatly helped us improve the quality of Kimball pianos.”) A nucleus of thirty workers were in the first training program. They, in turn, taught others and in July 1966, Habig proved instrumental in having his company purchase Bosendorfer.
In the 1970s the Kimball brand had grown strong enough for the company to manufacture and market a line of office furniture under that name, and in July 1974 the Jasper Corporation changed its name to Kimball International. Two years later, in September 1976, the firm went public, having an initial public offering of a half million shares of stock and trading on the NASDAQ Exchange. The company expanded in the office furniture market by launching the National Office Furniture brand and entered the hospitality market by launching the Kimball Hospitality brand.
The expertise gained in piano and organ manufacturing enabled the company to launch its contract electronics division, Kimball Electronics, which grew rapidly and globally. In 2014, Kimball Electronics was spun off to a completely separate company, Kimball Electronics, returning Kimball International to its roots as a furniture-focused company. Faced with declining sales and strong competition from Japanese firms, Kimball International halted its production of organs in the mid-1980s and the last Kimball piano came off the production line in February 1996. This piano was signed by all employees that helped build it along with the company executive team. It resides today in the Kimball International Headquarters in Jasper, IN.
Over the years, the scholarship program Habig helped establish for employees granted nearly $2 million to help with college educations and is still in existence today. This program is now funded by the Kimball International-Habig Foundation, along with other acts of corporate social responsibility.
Kimball International has a long history as an environmentally sensitive company. The ideas of conservation and sustainability, of sensitivity toward our environment, were deeply ingrained in the culture by Habig. Over time, we’ve made continual progress as a responsible steward of resources and an agent of sustainable change in our industry. In fact, Kimball International reached a point of owning over 27,000 acres of hardwood timberlands and continues the commitment to not only meeting current environmental and social standards, but also setting new ones.
Prior to his death in 1999 at age 91, reminiscing about his experience in the world of business, however, Habig did not concentrate on sales made or profits earned, but on what his company had done for its employees and the community. “A lot of others like to take but not give,” said Habig. “To be successful, to have a good community, you have to want to give rather than take.”
The guiding principles of Kimball International still reflect those values that Arnold Habig built and grew the company. That our customer is our business, our people are the company, the environment is our home, and profits are the ultimate measure of success. Together with our employees and partners, we continue this commitment of total quality that exceeds everyone’s expectations.