Fixing the NFRC

Our report on the most recent meeting of the National Fenestration Rating Council (NFRC) is included in the September issue of USGlass magazine. The decision-making process continues to be the source of major frustration for most in the know in the glass industry. In fact, some leading members of the glass industry are considering boycotting the next meeting. And Greg Carney of the Glass Association of North America (GANA) and Marg Webb of the Insulating Glass Manufacturers Alliance (IGMA) have already withheld their votes in protest at a previous meeting.

Those in the contract glazing industry who got involved early have long since seen their input ignored. Contract glaziers are among our industry’s busiest segment and most are happy to provide their input when they feel it will be considered as part of the democratic process. But they will not be part of a charade that does not have an open and fair process. And anyone who thinks that there is democracy going on in the NFRC’s process has either drunk the kool-aid or been fed a great line—or maybe dinner—by NFRC officials.

Yet, there is a way to fix this. There is a way to make sure the process is open and democratic and that all parties involved from every industry segment or any “stakeholder group” (as NFRC calls them) feels the same way. There is a way to ensure that participants have no quarrel with the process and no market segment feels cheated. Here’s how: NFRC should develop its programs in accordance with the ASTM or ANSI methods for consensus standards development.

These methods provide a sound, proven method for developing documents. The procedures have been properly vetted for fairness and balance. Since NFRC professes a commitment to openness, the adoption of such procedures should only be welcome by the group’s board of directors. And the development of all procedures, policies, approaches, certifications or other items would no longer be suspect.

If an effort such as this is not made, the commercial glass industry’s buy-in will never occur. At a recent GANA meeting one participant was so upset by the NFRC’s antics that he said he plans to add a separate line on all his estimates and invoices called “NFRC compliance fees.” “I want the architects—and everyone else who sees this estimates—to know right away how much this is costing them,” he said. NFRC’s use a proven consensus-building process might also help advance the acceptance of its work without such measures.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Sailing Away for a Day

Our office always tries to take a day or two each summer to do something a little different. We get just a few days a year without a magazine in production and used to hold the stereotypical “office picnic” on one of those days.

A few years ago, we tried something a little different and went to a local amusement park—King’s Dominion for those of you who know Virginia—and it was a great hit. Last year, we spent the day at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. We got to see the new baby panda, the refurbished reptile house, one very tired looking sloth bear and a great variety of unique mammals. The best part of that trip for me was watching the looks on the faces of the kids of our employees as they got to see the animals. I have some great pictures of the Taffera girls (daughters of DWM publisher Tara Taffera) at the petting zoo that I treasure.

Our venues are always chosen by majority vote and this year, a trip to Tangier Island (http://www.tangierisland-va.com/island) won.

If you’ve never heard of Tangier Island, you are not alone. It is a 1 ½ mile wide and three-mile long island at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. It was one he first places settled by the British in the 1600s and was relatively isolated until the 1960s. Some of it older residents still speak the King’s English with a decidedly English accent that is neat to hear. The only businesses are crabbing, fishing and a little tourism. Tangier Island has just over 600 residents, 20 cars, a ton of golf carts. It has no post office, no bank and ferry service twice a day to both Virginia and Maryland.

Everything used for the construction of buildings there comes by boat. Glass is brought in via boats from three glass companies that work on the island and is rolled in carts from ship to site. “Most of the glass that comes in is already in windows,” explained Captain Billy, captain of our vessel, Liquid Assets http://www.captbillyscharters.com/charters.asp), and our tour guide. “None of the pieces that come over are too big because of the transportation. You just don’t see large expanses of glass.”
Pity, because the views are beautiful.

After a day of visiting the island (and, boy, did we pick a hot day) we all gathered at Hilda Crockett’s Chesapeake House (http://tangierisland-va.com/cheshouse/) for an indescribably delicious meal of Tangier fare, including crab cakes made with crab so fresh I was expecting it to crawl away.

The islanders were so hospitable that they opened the new Tangier History Museum (http://tangierisland-va.com/water_trail_brochure/) especially for us in the early evening. We saw a very moving film about the history of the island and how the Chesapeake, their way of life and their livelihood is being destroyed by environmental irresponsibility. It gave life and new cause to everything we are trying to do in the office to be green. We then boarded Liquid Assets and enjoyed a peaceful trip—and beautiful sunset—on our way home.

Photo Captions (from top to bottom)

• Views of Tangier Island
• The Key Communications team enjoys a visit to the Tangier History Museum
• Art director Dawn Campbell, chair of Key's activities committee with Captain Billy (right) and first mate Tony (left) on Tangier Island.

The Thrill of the Scoop

Some of the most enjoyable times of my life were those I spent working on my college newspaper. In those days, issues came out twice a week, tabloid size, anywhere from 32 to 64 pages an issue. The Student Press was quite an undertaking, considering it was produced totally by students who stayed up all night twice a week to make sure the issue got done. Then, as the sun came up, we’d draw straws to see who would drive it the 90 miles to the printer. This practice continued until one of the editors nearly feel asleep behind the wheel on the way back and we decided to hire a driver—who was henceforth listed in the masthead as “chauffeur.”

Being at the university and working at the newspaper was the most fun I ever had in my life. You might think I’d be bittersweet about it now and long for those times again, but I don’t. That’s probably because I enjoy working for USGlass quite a bit, and also because I knew what I gift I’d been given when I had it.

Anyway, I digress. At the newspaper, I worked with a lot of talented award-winning young people who went on to write for the New York Times, USA Today, the Boston Globe, Gannett News Service, Forbes, Rolling Stone—you get the idea. I still enjoy reading their bylines and seeing their names on the wires.

So I had to smile when I saw this story yesterday written by Jill Coffey, night editor of the New York Daily News. Jill might have learned how to be a night news editor by working all those late nights at our student paper, but she became part of a story earlier this week when a yet a third person decided to climb up the exterior of the New York Times building.

So THIS is how the News scooped the Times on a story about the Times own building, which I know Jill absolutely loved and HERE is how they are going to fix it. Yet again, it’s always about the glass.


P.S.: Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve checked in, but truth is, this is my slow travel time. I enjoyed a July with very few trips in it but I am getting ready to get back on the road this week.

Business Lessons Sealed With a Kiss

My “baby” sister is only two and one-half years younger than me, and she lives just one hour from central Pennsylvania. So, when it was decided I’d be going to the summer meeting of the American Architectural Manufacturers Association (AAMA); there seemed a plan to be hatched. We’d both arrive at the Hotel Hershey in Pennsylvania late Saturday, have dinner and do a little sightseeing Sunday morning before she headed back to Delaware when the meeting started.

After all, why would AAMA have a meeting in the middle of an amusement-park, tourist-attraction-land if they didn’t expect us to check it out?

Well, I found out why. In the course of our half-day sightseeing, which included the obligatory visit to Chocolate World and the exquisite Hershey Gardens, we toured the Hershey Museum. Yes, it seemed a little scattered with its three separate collections (Native American, German Dutch and Hershey history) but what it really provided was a reminder of just what entrepreneurs do and how much of a difference one person can make to the business landscape.

Milton Hershey grew up in a household of very modest means and was sent to New York in his late teens to become a candy maker’s apprentice. A failure at the candy business in three cities, he returned to this area in Pennsylvania and set up shop there. He achieved some notoriety in standardizing the manufacture of caramel candies and become known for them. Then he set his sights on chocolate, then a strictly European delicacy. He then began incorporating milk (thus keeping local farmers in business) and sugar.

Convinced that there would be a market for “milk” chocolate, he sold his caramel business in 1900 for one million dollars. Let me write that again. That’s one million dollars in 1900 (approximately equal to $25 million today). He used the proceeds of the sale to perfect his milk chocolate process and the Hershey bar was born. Hershey’s Kisses followed a few years later and still look the same today—except their price has increased considerably from the half penny they were in 1903.

Hershey eventually made the decision to sell the caramel company and to concentrate on making only a few products on a massive scale, thus turning candy making from a local “mom and pop” industry in a nationwide one. Hershey’s entrepreneurialism led to mass production in an industry where it had never existed before and led to massive changes in an industry.

Hershey was quite the philanthropist in his day, using his profits to build the town of Hershey, then to build the attractions to bring tourists to town and fund a wide variety of causes including disadvantaged youth.

Of course, Milton Hershey is basically canonized everywhere you go in Hershey. One display in the museum quotes an employee of the 1930s saying how working at Hershey was really just fun all day, while the display on the opposite side of the room mentions the strike of 1937 and the subsequent unionization of Hershey’s plants. But leave it to those folks at AAMA to remind us how great success in business can be built on a conviction and a bowl of beans. Cacao beans.

Please visit http://www.usgnn.com/ for updates about the AAMA meeting.

Memorial Day Travels

Even though Memorial Day weekend is known as a great travel weekend, sometimes the time you spend on the road is all in your head. My trip started when USGlass editor Megan Headley asked if I would rustle up some old issues of the magazine. The June issue of USGlass includes our 25th Annual New Products Guide and Megan wanted to scour the very first New Products Guides for ideas and artwork. Megan knew that I (like so many of you, I am sure) keep a complete set of every issue of USGlass magazine in “archives” in my basement (fear not, we have a true offsite archives as well) and that borrowing the issues wouldn’t involve more than a trip to the cellar for me.

Now Megan is usually spot-on, but when she suggested this would be a quick and simple task, she was dead wrong. Once I’d brought the requisite issues out, I just had to go through them. So I sat down with a cup of tea, and away I went through a time tunnel.

What a trip it was! Names that I hadn’t heard for years kept flowing through my brain: PTI had a new adhesive … Tempglass (long since acquired) was advertising “flat, clear distortion-free tempered glass” (funny, we have an article about this in the June ’08 issue too) and Hordis Brothers was heralding the machinery systems to make it. Vistawall trumpeted its 11 locations round the country … PPG was celebrating Solarcool’s 15th anniversary … Interpane was announcing its first plant in the United States, to be located in Deerfield, Wis.; the company planned to make a little-known, misunderstood product called low-emissivity glass.

I saw the names of companies that had faded away or gotten out of the industry, such as Ateco and Morton Thiokol. Binswanger was hiring “contract management professionals,” and the Flat Glass Marketing Association was selling its Glazing Manual (in this case, the name of the organization has changed, but its Glazing Manual is still going strong). An ad for J. Sussman had a picture of daughter Erin in it—in diapers—and Glass Medic was explaining this thing called “glass repair.” Glastec ’88 (one “s” in it then) was being heavily promoted as attracting 30,000 attendees and being held in Dusseldorf, West Germany. In a few months, more than 60,000 will attend glasstec ’08 (double s) in a unified Germany.

There were some constants too, such as Palmer Mirro-Mastic, C.R. Laurence and USGlass itself. The only primary manufacturer that bridged the time warp was PPG, but I wonder how much longer that will last. Pilkington didn’t own LOF yet, AGC didn’t own AFG, Cardinal wasn’t a manufacturer and Guardian was still a very quiet company, though you can see in the news stories that it was growing fast.

The people in the news gave me pause as well. Don Goldfus had just been named chairman of Apogee Enterprises … a guy named Rick Wright of Hordis Brothers had been appointed chair of the Glazing Committee of the Sealed Insulating Glass Manufacturers Association (SIGMA) … and there was a picture of Rick Cunningham at a trade show …

In 1986, we were just beginning to talk about the idea of the value-added glass products. Well, that’s an idea that took more than 20 years to stick. I don’t think anyone thought then that U.S. manufacturers would finally move toward value-added products because so much of the commodity glass business has moved offshore.

You can see why it was a trip I could take for hours on end. So even though I didn’t use a single gallon of gas this holiday weekend, I went far and away and back again.

Yee-haw!

Glass TEXpo ’08 was a mighty fine event. Nearly 500 industry professionals from Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana—along with a smattering of attendees from as far away as Calgary and Pittsburgh—came together for a great two days of education and exhibition. There were three things that made me feel especially good about TEXpo.

First was the number of first-time attendees at the show. I stopped counting at ten, but had at least ten shop owners tell me that this year’s TEXpo was the first industry event they’d ever attended. Most mentioned how hard it is to get time away from their shops and how having something relatively close by made it so they could attend. That gives me a really good feeling because it was one of our goals when we started providing regional education in 1994.
I also was heartened to see a number of new products introduced at the show. One exhibitor from Germany showed a great new glass handler that was no bigger than the palm of a large hand. (CLICK HERE for more information.)

Another exhibitor from Japan showed examples of 3D glass that mimics a beveled appearance at a fraction of the cost. (CLICK HERE for more information. ). And first-time exhibitor Techniform had this to say about TEXpo:



But most memorable moment came toward the end of the first day of the show, when Lou Green of A1 Glass Co. in Beaumont, Donald Day of the Texas Glass Association in Victoria, Texas, and Bob Lawrence of Craftsman Fabricated Glass in Houston got together and reminisced about the formation of the Texas Glass Association (which co-sponsors the event) and the various and assorted characters they’ve come to know in the industry and the association over the years. Boy, do they have some stories. I could have listened to their colorful tales all night, but had some business to attend to just as they were talking about a former employee who had been married 11 times.

As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas.

Glass TEXpo will return to San Antonio in Spring 2010. I am already looking forward to it.

P.S. After TEXpo was over on Saturday afternoon, Tina Czar and I headed back to Dallas (see previous blog). Let me just say that even though Hertz advertises its GPS as “Never Lost,” it shouldn’t, that downtown Dallas is lovely at midnight and that when the shuttle bus driver looks at you with nine bags, laptops, cameras, LCDs and boxes between you and says “take the elevator to the skywalk,” you shouldn’t listen. The skywalk is actually three long flights up and three long flights down. The bus driver is probably still laughing at us now.

San Antonio Bound … and Princesses for a Night

“You know, we have three or four things we have to do in Dallas,” said our ace event planner Tina Czar to me one afternoon nearly six months ago. “Why don’t we go to Glass TEXpo a day earlier than usual, do our stuff and drive down to San Antonio?” Now the fact that Tina was planning this nearly half a year ago would surprise anyone until they met Tina. She is planner extraordinaire and that means she plans well, often—and early. She was to handle everything, except our leg from Dallas to San Antonio. That was my job.

So I decided to show Tina that I could plan a few things of my own. And, while not six months ahead of time, I did decide SIX WHOLE DAYS ahead of time that I wanted us to spend the night in Waxahachie. I’d been there a number of times before. (USGlass has a great advertiser there, U.S. Aluminum) and been enchanted by the old downtown feeling, the magnificent Courthouse (at right) and the beautiful homes along Main Street. It would be a straight shot from there down to San Antonio.

There are no chain motels in the old downtown area of Waxahachie. So I started looking at bed and breakfasts (B&B) and found one right on Main Street. Now, I’ve never stayed in a B&B before, but knowing Tina would be with me gave me the courage to try something new. And we both have spent more than our fair share of time in Hampton Inns and other assorted motels so I thought such a visit would be something different for a change. So I booked two rooms at the Chaska House on Main Street in Waxahachie. If nothing else, Tina would know I’d done my homework.

You know the drill. We’d both gotten up around 4 a.m., driven to the airport, taken our respective flights, got the car, had the meetings and driven almost 90 minutes in rush hour when we arrived there around 7 p.m. We were greeted by the notes of some very peaceful music escaping out of the home’s beautiful wrap-around porch. Our hosts, Linda and Louis Brown, had raised their family in the house, then moved out for a year, gutted and had converted to a B&B nearly 20 years ago. It’s an exquisite home.

Louis is a retired engineer and Linda, who hails from Atlanta, was kind enough to show me some of the unique glass features in the home. Each guest room had a unique glass door leading inside to a distinct theme. (One room, the Mark Twain, looked like the inside of a treehouse). I slept in the Teddy Roosevelt room, with a skylight directly over the bed (at left). “That’s got to leak,” I said to myself as I eyed the room with trepidation. It didn’t. The heavy rain and hail storm that woke me in the middle of the night proved that.

In the morning, Linda showed me the front door of the house. It was an almost full glass door (at right) with exquisitely beveled edges on all four side—and a big bullet hole right at eye level. “Some boys got real mischievous one night and shot it will a B-B gun,” said Linda. “We were going to replace it, then we found out it wasn’t just glass, it was crystal, real crystal. We decided to keep it as is.”

If you have never stayed in a B&B before it does feel a bit strange in the beginning—like you are intruding in a stranger’s home. But the graciousness and hospitality of the innkeepers quickly overtake any such feelings and their desire to see you have a good time is so genuine it’s easy to feel like family quickly.

“No, you sit,” said Linda to Tina (who had emerged from the Great Gatsby room as refreshed as Daisy Buchanan herself) as she tried to help clear the breakfast dishes, “you both are princesses while you are here.”

But, alas, it was time to go.

Louis and Linda were great hosts. Linda even tracked me down after I left an important folder behind and was kind enough to take it to Fedex it to me. I know, I know—poor planning on my part. Please don’t tell Tina when you see her.

-Deb

P.S.: We have made it to San Antonio now and are staying at the historic Menger Hotel, where TR himself recruited his Rough Riders (and check out that unique skylight!). I hope you get a chance to join us here at Glass TEXpo Friday and Saturday. It’s going to be a great event. See you there.