Z-line Design’s Jim Sexton
Interview by R. Randall Padfield - October 1, 2009
Jim Sexton quit college after about a week because he wanted to create his own entrepreneurial future. “I have a knack for designing and picking things that people will buy,” he said. “When I got in the leather business 25 years ago, leather was a tufted sofa with no promotion behind it and very few sold.” Figuring the public would want to buy natural materials if the price point was right, he designed some items for Emerson Furniture and “they sold like crazy.”
But Sexton has also seen the down side of being an entrepreneur. “About 35 years ago, I opened a store that was like a wholesale club. We built it up, but all of a sudden Nixon went down, gas prices went up, we were losing in Vietnam–and it failed,” he explained. “Going bankrupt isn’t fun. You have to pick yourself up and go back to work.”
In 1995 he formed Z-Line Designs. Today the company is a leader in ready-to-assemble furniture. It has thousands of employees and sells to Wal-Mart, Staples, Sears, Office Max and Target. Its headquarters are in San Ramon, Calif.; its main showroom is in High Point, N.C.; and its factories are in China and Taiwan. A sponsor of Nascar on the Joe Gibbs Racing team, driven by Kyle Busch, and Indy car on the Dale Coyne Racing team, Z-Line also owns and operates three business jets. Sexton himself travels more than 200 days a year.
How did Z-Line come about?
Some friends in Silicon Valley were telling me about the Internet and people communicating by computer. And I thought, if this works, then people will be buying a lot of computers for their homes and they’ll need furniture for them. So what I should do, I thought, is build the cheapest furniture that could be manufactured, which would be in China, do a flat box, which ships through distribution centers easily, and sell the furniture to the big-box retailers.
I started designing some desks and created the R-Z with frosted glass. My wife Monica asked, “What will you call the company?” Looking at the desk, it took me only about three seconds and I said, “Z-Line.”
Did you fund this yourself?
Yes, and Monica and I are still the sole owners.
How did you get involved in Taiwan and China?
We hired some Chinese employees in California who knew how to do business in Hong Kong and I got an agent in Taiwan. But as we got into it, I learned that the factories there are small, so you have problems if you want 20,000 of an item. I told my agent we had to go to China. We went from one factory to another and halfway through the trip I realized my agent spoke Mandarin and the Chinese were speaking Cantonese. So I got a Chinese guy.
But it was still hard. I realized I needed to have a company run by American standards. So we fired everyone over there and I brought a Chinese factory owner to my house in America. I said, “Here’s my money, you put up your money. I’ll tell you what to make and how to make it. We’ll never have a defect and you don’t ship anything unless it is 100-percent perfect. I’ll hire my own staff in China that will help run this for you.”
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