In 2003, Rochdale Spears Group chairman and founder Geoff Hawkes went all-in on Vietnam, constructing the beginnings of what is now a 2.2-million-square-foot, vertically integrated manufacturing footprint with a foundry and sawmill. Today, the company—which operates its own SONDER Living line, a robust hospitality program, and provides product design and manufacturing for the likes of RH, Anthropologie and Williams-Sonoma, Inc.—wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Hawkes tells BOH how he built his business abroad.

Geoff Hawkes

“We were an early adopter of manufacturing in Vietnam. Back in the early 2000s, China was more developed, already well-known for low-cost, high-volume manufacturing. We were looking at it from an artisanal point of view—high design, high quality, and smaller batch sizes—and decided that Vietnam offered more of the boutique element to production. We brought craftsmen from venerable English manufacturers to teach our employees, and now they’ve got something the West has lost: the ability to do repetitive, artisanal work. We are extremely lucky, because if we were setting up today, we’re exactly where we’d want to be. 

“In the old days, factories were always sited close to raw materials, but there aren’t actually a lot of raw materials in Vietnam. We ship sawn logs from managed forests in the Appalachian Mountains into Vietnam—that’s how important it is to be close to skilled labor. By committing to and investing in that talent, we’ve become an employer of choice. Our work environments are equal to those of any Western factory, with lighting, heat and dust control. We run training programs and invest in retention programs.