Open Source: The history behind NC’s latest furniture factory closures and big biotech win
I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.
Factories aren’t opened or shuttered out of nowhere. There are histories behind the headlines, traceable decisions that sometimes years later lead to hundreds of jobs being created or erased in North Carolina communities. Two recent announcements, in two different parts of the state, exemplified this dynamic.
First, positive news. On Thursday, the large biotech company Amgen said it would eventually add $1 billion and hire 370 more people at its soon-to-be-opened drug manufacturing site in the Wake County town of Holly Springs.
Today, the town attracts life sciences investments with some regularity. That wasn’t always so. Two decades ago, Holly Springs was firmly a Raleigh bedroom community with a population less than a third its current size. Among those back then who reimagined what the town could be was Dick Sears, Holly Spring’s late longtime mayor.
“What happened almost 20 years ago, the town council and Mayor Dick Sears at the time said, ‘We want to become a life science, bioscience hub. How do we get there?’” current town council member Tim Forrest told me this week. “So, they started gearing infrastructure changes to the land development, water, sewer. All that for pending growth but also for how to recruit major businesses.”
Holly Springs notched a massive win in July 2006, when the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis said it would open a flu vaccine manufacturing facility. The North Carolina Biotechnology Center recruited Novartis, which chose Holly Springs over the other finalist, Athens, Georgia. The plant began operating in 2012 and employed 500 people by the following year. In 2015, Novartis sold the facility and its influenza vaccine business to the Australian company CSL Limited, which continues to run the site under the name CSL Seqirus.
More recently, Holly Springs has secured new factory commitments from drug manufacturers FujiFilm Diosynth and Amgen. In 2021, each announced plans to open Holly Springs facilities. And in 2024, each announced nine-digit investment expansions. Combined, these two projects now promise to bring 2,125 jobs and $4.2 billion in direct investment to the community.
“Number one in our strategic plan is life science and bioscience recruitment,” Forrest said. “And that has been one of the biggest game changers for the town.”
Now for the negative news. On Nov. 19, the residential cabinet manufacturer MasterBrand notified the N.C. Commerce Department it would permanently close two North Carolina cabinet factories. Each decision comes after a dizzying series of consolidations.
One of the impacted factories, Dura Supreme in Statesville, opened last year. Dura Supreme started as a family-run business in Minnesota and in 2019 was acquired by the private equity firm GHK Capital Partners. In May, MasterBrand bought it from GHK.
MasterBrand is an Ohio-based publicly traded company with its own history that dates to the American Tobacco Company in the 1950s. It has more recently consumed smaller residential cabinet makers, noting in its latest annual financial filing that “we have proven to be a highly effective consolidation platform.”
“We expect to drive long-term stockholder value by utilizing a disciplined process to identify, evaluate and execute strategic acquisitions and integrate acquired businesses,” the company added, later stating it had endured restructuring costs of $4.2 million, $25.1 million and $10.1 million in 2021, 2022, and 2023 respectively — mostly contributed to severance costs.
Masterbrand is today the largest cabinet manufacturer in North America. Ending its operations in Statesville will affect 74 employees.
On the same day, Nov. 19, MasterBrand also alerted state officials it would lay off around 200 workers by closing the Norcraft Companies cabinet factory in the Randolph County town of Liberty, about 30 minutes southeast of Greensboro.
This factory was opened in 1986 by the local manufacturer UltraCraft, which ran it until 2013. Then, UltraCraft was bought by the Minnesota-based cabinet maker Norcraft. Two years later, Masterbrand bought Norcraft.
Masterbrand told North Carolina Commerce officials their choice to shut down their plants in Liberty and Statesville came down to a “business decision.”
These aren’t the complete backstories of the Amgen project in Holly Springs or the shuttered cabinet factories in the Piedmont. But when you look passed into the economic headlines, good or bad, a fuller picture usually comes into focus.
The life and death of Marshall Brain
In 1998, Marshall Brain launched the website Howstuffworks.com, which became a hit of the early internet. There he contributed accessible scientific explanations on how everyday gadgets functioned, detailing the inner workings of VCRs, airplanes, car engines, and many more items. By the turn of the century, tens of thousands visited the site daily.
Brain did this as a hobby while raising four children with his wife in Zebulon. Then How Stuff grew into his main occupation. He sold the edutainment company in 2002, and five years later, Discovery Communications purchased it for $250 million.
He eventually returned to N.C. State, where he had previously taught, to lead an entrepreneurship program for engineers. Multiple former students remembered him fondly.
Brain was found dead in his NC State office on the morning of Nov. 20. The cause of death was listed as suicide. It was a sudden end to an eventful life. Hours before university police found his body, Brain had sent an email to colleagues and friends in which he detailed grievances with multiple university department heads. While NC State leaders had previously announced Brain was retiring, he insisted the school was forcing him to leave.
“I have just been through one of the most demoralizing, depressing, humiliating, unjust processes possible with the university,” he wrote in a Nov. 7 email, which he included in his message to colleagues on the morning his body was discovered.
The university declined to comment on Brain’s claims.
When it comes to mental health and a person you don’t know, it is important to be extremely cautious about drawing conclusions. Information is limited and answers may never materialize. What I do now know for certain is that Brain made many impactful contributions in his 63 years.
If you or a loved one is experiencing mental health-related distress, the CDC recommends you contact the free and confidential 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. Help is available 24/7/365.
Saudi award for Morrisville water startup
Last week, NALA Membranes CEO Sue Mecham was in the coastal city of Jeddah to receive a global innovation prize in desalination from the Saudi Water Authority.
Founded in 2018 and based in Morrisville, NALA Membranes focuses on finding solutions for water reuse and desalination. Mecham won an award from the Saudi governmental agency (which came with $100,000) for NALA’s work on a new type of membrane (think water filter) that more effectively performs reverse osmosis.
“The material that is used today in reverse osmosis membranes is prone to being damaged by disinfectants that can be used to keep that water clean,” she said in a phone interview this week. “What we’ve done is we’ve developed a material and a membrane from that material that is stable to very low levels of chlorine that can be used in drinking water to keep the biological growth from being there. So, keep the water safe and keep the membranes clean.”
Bracketed by two bodies of saltwater, Saudi Arabia relies on desalination more than any other country. And it believes the Triangle startup with 10 employees might have an answer.
Clearing my cache
- Research Triangle Park is finally getting mail service.
- FedEx plans to lay off 340 workers between cuts in Raleigh and a facility closure in Durham.
- The Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. As the state’s top business recruitment organization, EDPNC says it’s helped secure $67 billion in direct investment and 200,000 new jobs.
- NC A&T State University plans to design the state’s first bachelor’s degree program specific to artificial intelligence.
- More furniture talk. NPR’s Planet Money podcast visited the High Point furniture market to see how international industry trends originate in North Carolina. I visited the twice-annual market in April and wrote about why it might be hotter than Milan’s.
National Tech Happenings
- The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was killed Wednesday morning in an apparent assassination.
- It seems like Bluesky has finally become a legitimate rival to X/Twitter.
- Australia is barring everyone under 16 from using social media. Could it work here? Will it work there?
Thanks for reading!
This story was originally published December 6, 2024 at 9:05 AM with the headline "Open Source: The history behind NC’s latest furniture factory closures and big biotech win."
