HIGH POINT, North Carolina —The Revolution Brand of performance fabric by STI is putting additional strain on its manufacturing capability as it scrambles to add more production in Kings Mountain, N.C. Revolution is a new growth engine for this very successful weaver started in 1993 by the 50 year old CEO, Sean Gibbons. STI is a DBA. Kings Plush, Inc. is the corporate name. The company started as a velvet mill...but “STI” is a relic of when "we made fabrics for aircraft, trains, buses–Specialty Textile Interiors." STI sounded good, and we were already known by it,” so we kept it. “We’ve gone from zero sales in Revolution to 250,000 yards a week in just two years’ time,” he explains. “This is our fastest growing business and accounts for half of all of our new business today,” he remarks. STI is generating $150 million in sales as an upholstery weaver including its Muebletex S.A. cut and sew business founded in 2006 and based in Nicaragua according to Gibbons. This puts STI a stone’s throw away from overtaking Valdese Weavers Inc., the largest mill today in the USA. Both STI and Valdese are on the F&FI list of the Top 10 in the world. Valdese recently sold its business to its employees in a leveraged buyout less than a year ago. STI is still a private company but it is well on the radar of several Chinese mills which have come to recognize STI as a ferocious competitor in the USA. “We are going from 500,000 yards per week to 750,000 by the end of 2017,” Gibbons states. STI is adding 70 new Dornier Jacquard looms with Staubli heads and Dobby looms with Staubli heads. We just installed 30 looms and will add 40 more when the new building is completed. The expansion represents an investment of $17 million, he says. “We need to take care of our customers that we’ve been doing business with for 20 years,” Gibbons says in pointing to the new expansion. Most of STI sales are geared to residential but this could change once capacity catches up to the order rate. One downside of the tight delivery situation for STI is that is it has been prevented from further pursuing sales in the contract/hospitality market. It currently has only one customer in Valley Forge, Inc., the Pompano Beach, FL based hospitality colossus. STI in effect, has become a victim of its own success as it tries to reduce standard lead-times to its customers from eight weeks back to four to six weeks. STI has demonstrated a voracious appetite for expanding into new business segments and is becoming a global player in the upholstery business in sourcing and making deals. Since 2006, STI’s Muebletex operation started cutting Chinese fabric into kits for export back to the States to what is now 12 furniture manufacturing customers. Muebletex also buys fabrics from Richloom, Culp, Gum Tree, Z Wovens, Marlatex and Merrimac for those same customers where the goods are cut and sewn in Nicaragua. "There is no duty levied on Chinese goods cut and sewn in Nicaragua," Gibbons adds. In addition, STI has a growing cut and sew leather business. The Nicaraguan factory was doubled in size in 2014 when Angelo Lassandro was hired from Natuzzi. Under Lassandro’s watchful eye, hides are imported from Brazil and Italy and cut in Nicaragua. “Cutting leather is a very different business than cutting textiles,” Gibbons points out. If that’s not enough, STI acts as North American agents for JBS, which is described as the largest protein company in the world, raising pigs, beef and chicken. JBS also owns leather tanneries in Brazil, Italy, Vietnam and Argentina which provides product to STI customers. STI has a Chinese trading company in Shanghai to enable it to handle China based fabrics which it sources, develops and finishes with quality control in piece dyed varieties with foam, felt or non-woven backings. STI also prints in Spain and Turkey on cotton and cotton/polyester goods but 90 percent of everything sold by STI is made in Kings Mountain, Gibbons stresses. About two years ago, STI launched its first foray into outdoor fabrics under the ‘Revolution’ performance brand which is competitive to Glen Raven’s Sunbrella® and Crypton® which boasts no pfc (polyfluoride chemicals) on the filament polypropylene yarn. It’s priced at $4-$7 a yard and is selling off the charts to the jobber and furniture manufacturer according to Sean Gibbons. However, STI has gone one better. It has designed a website which is offering Revolution on a direct sale basis to the consumer by the yard with a three-yard minimum. Sean’s son Anderson (23) and his colleague, Danielle Pellomo (22) are manning the web business. Since the mill started in 1993, Gibbons took on five equity owners: John Kay, President; Mark Hovis, Chief Operating Officer of STI; Sean’s wife and her two sisters. STI is still a privately held company with close ties to SunTrust Bank. Sean’s father Bill is called the ‘chairman’ and Sean says he could not have been as successful without his father’s contacts in the furniture industry. Bill is President and owner of Phoenix Textiles, an independent company which produces furniture trimming. About the same time Revolution brand started, STI bought Brentwood Mils from Perry Skeen, still President of the company in the higher end decorative jacquard business. Brentwood makes most of its line in the USA but about 20 percent is produced in Turkey in acrylic chenille; “our own designs but we’re partners with a mill over there,” Gibbons explains. Kathy Dotterer is Director of Design for Brentwood. A new line of Revolution chenille will be produced at Brentwood branded Revolution Plus, a finer denier, multipurpose, machine washable fabric geared for slipcovers. Initially, “STI produced 100 percent cotton plaids and checks as a boutique mill out of the mainstream in the 90’s but this market started to shrink. In 1999, we switched to polyester warps and olefin chenille. Ultimately, STI became a powerhouse resource to the furniture industry and a low cost competitor to American suppliers. Ultimately, STI became a tough competitor to Chinese suppliers as well. “From 1999 to 2005, STI had spectacular growth to about $35 million in sales. “We offered a better value and could deliver faster than suppliers like Quaker, Culp, Mastercraft, Phillips and Carolina Mills,” he adds. Only STI remains of this original group although Culp is a serious player in leather and ticking today. In 2005, STI bought its first jacquard looms and hired Glen Read, then a young designer from Mastercraft who put wheels on the STI design bus. “We added polyester chenille flat yarns and boucle’s for the promotional market,” Gibbons remembers well. Microsuede put us at a disadvantage at the time so by adding jacquards, we got new customers.” It was around that time that all the major U.S. mills died and $2 billion in sales shifted to China leaving STI as one of the last men standing in the USA. “I was on vacation in Utah July, 2007, when I got a dozen emails abut Quaker folding its business and this was followed by the financial downturn that hit us in 2008.