Longaberger Co. is putting all its employees in one basket–a very big one.
The maker of hand-woven, wooden baskets and other homey crafts is moving to a new $30 million headquarters: a giant, free-standing replica of the company’s trademark basket.
That gives the closely held company one of the more inventive architectural designs to hit corporate America in recent years.
With a clay-colored stucco exterior and “handles” that tower overhead, the seven-story structure has the look of the real thing.
“Baskets are our signature,” says Dave Longaberger, the company’s 63-year-old chairman. “People told me, `Dave, you can’t build that basket. It’s never been done.’ But I said, `They can put a man on the moon and bring him back. Don’t tell me they can’t build a basket.’ “
The edifice sits just off State Route 16 in this central Ohio town, down the road from the National Heisey Glass Museum, a collection of dinner glasses and candy jars.
The building features a glass atrium that pours natural light down the center of the building to the first-floor lobby. A grand staircase leads to conference rooms and a set of glass elevators.
The handles–an engineering feat that took a year and a half to finish–are two 300-foot-long pieces of assembled, galvanized steel that rest on 18-inch pins, just as a real basket’s would. A special heating element, triggered by an outside sensor, warms the handles in winter so ice won’t form and fall through the atrium ceiling.
The building “is a monument, it’s a piece of pop art, it’s a gigantic billboard,” gushes Friedrich K.M. Bohm, chairman of NBBJ, the Columbus, Ohio, architecture firm that designed the structure. “The trick was to make it elegant but not kitschy–and it could have gotten kitschy very easily.”
In fact, that’s what many people were afraid of, says Longaberger, who came up with the idea five years ago. Everyone from bankers to architects warned him not to go with the design.
Some said the building was too difficult to construct. Others said the company would never be able to unload it if it suddenly decided to move.
But Longaberger, whose father started the company 70 years ago, says there was never any question that the headquarters would be a basket. Longaberger baskets have near cult-like status in the Midwest.
The company, which sold 7 million baskets last year and had revenue of $525 million, draws thousands of people to its manufacturing facility and basket-weaving museum here every year.
The new building will be a welcome change from Longaberger’s old headquarters, a former wool factory so structurally weak that workers can’t go upstairs. The aging office is crammed with cubicles and stacks of sample baskets. In some places, the matted carpet is held together with duct tape.
“It’s not really conducive to teamwork,” says Bonnie Callahan, a 13-year company veteran.
Longaberger was stubborn in guiding the design of the building, colleagues say. During one frustrating meeting with designers, he took one of the company’s baskets, put it on the conference-room table and said, “This is what I want.” Architects started designing the next day–using real Longaberger baskets as models.
That’s not to say there weren’t complications. Architects were stymied, for instance, by the fact that none of the floors are the same size. The seventh floor extends about eight feet farther out than the first.
Because of the basket “weave” carved into the stucco, the company was limited in the number of windows it could install. Architects suggested other ways to make the design easier to build–etching the wood design on glass windows, or putting a giant basket “shell” around a traditional building. Each time, Longaberger sent them back to the original basket look.
“I knew if I wavered one little bit, they would jump on that like crazy,” he says. The final result, he says, is “a beautiful piece of work.”
The company’s 500 headquarters employees won’t move into the building until the end of the year; construction workers are still finishing the interior.
But the building–which locals call “The Basket”–is already drawing attention. The state is touting it as a tourist destination, and highway drivers routinely slow down to gawk. Some pull over and take pictures.
When Longaberger’s engineers installed the 75-ton handles this summer–using two giant cranes and 110-ton bulldozers to mount them in place–schoolchildren from Madison Elementary School next door got out of class to watch the event.
“This kind of marketing, you can’t buy this,” says Longaberger, who is looking forward to the move. His office will be on the seventh floor with a wide view of the nearby hills whose trees are now turning autumn colors.
What if even he gets tired of working out of a basket? Longaberger thinks for a second, then admits that with his schedule, “I probably won’t be there that much.”
