Executives with Flexsteel Industries are breaking ground this morning for a $12 million building that will be the furniture-maker’s new corporate headquarters.
Justin Mills, a spokesman for Flexsteel, says the four-story building will blend into the architecture of the Port of Dubuque.
“We have about a year of construction, so we’re hoping to be in (the building) in September of 2012,” he says.
The building will be Flexsteel’s world headquarters. “We’re going to transition about 100 employees who manage our global operations to that facility,” Mills says. Those employees are already working in Dubuque and company executives have told Dubuque officials up to 10 more employees will be hired after the new facility opens.
The company moved to Dubuque 75 years ago and now employs more than 1200 people in eight states and in Vietnam, Thailand and China. There are about 315 employees in the Dubuque area.
“Even furniture that’s coming in from China, it starts with a spring unit that’s produced here in Dubuque, Iowa,” he says. “We export that spring to China to come back fully-upholstered into the U.S. because we maintain that we want to preserve the quality, the heritage, our core values of that spring unit and that every single unit that has Flexsteel on it comes from Dubuque, Iowa.”
Flexsteel was originally the name of the spring developed by a furniture company, which moved from Minneapolis to Dubuque in 1936, where a conveyor-belt plant was established. The company now makes furniture and seating for homes, businesses, boats and RVs.