In 2001, John Shilling purchased Artisan House, famous for the metal wall, floor and tabletop sculptures its designers and crafters have been making since Jerry Fels and Curtis Freiler founded the company in 1964.

Fels and Freiler, in fact, combined their names to become C. Jeré, the “fictitious” artist whose early signed vintage pieces fetch thousands of dollars from collectors. Some of the pieces have even shown up on Antiques Roadshow, and designer Jonathan Adler recently commissioned the company to reproduce some of its 1970s designs.

The artists work out of Artisan House's 40,000-sq.-ft. design studio in Burbank, Calif., using copper, bronze, brass, steel, aluminum and chrome. Since Shilling took the helm, the company's catalog has grown to more than 350 designs, sales volume has tripled, and several employees who have been around since the company's early years say the company has never run better.

Shilling says he doesn't know about that — he was working on Wall Street back then. “After business school, I spent 20 years working for a few companies, Morgan Stanley, Drexel Burnham Lambert, before deciding I wanted to do something different. So I started looking around and saw a job with this New York company called Interiors.

“The chairman, Max Munn, was in the process of buying up decorative accessories companies. Max was good at doing deals, not as good at operations, so after a couple of years the company ran into some difficult times and he had to sell his subsidiaries. Artisan House was the smallest, only doing a few million in sales. I'd spent a lot of time on Artisan House, put in a computer system for them and had gotten to know all the people out in L.A. so I put a bid in and it was accepted.”

That was September 2001, and after the events of 9/11, sales came to a halt. “Then I came to High Point for the first time in October of 2001,” Schilling said. “Everyone here was just gloom and doom, but for me, it was my first market — I'd never seen so many customers in my life.”

It was also the first time Shilling saw his company's showroom. “I'd seen plenty of pictures, and I saw some of the art when I visited the facility in L.A., but the first time I walked in and saw the whole showroom I thought 'wow! This is so cool, this is really nice stuff, even better than the pictures.'” He also took the time to walk around High Point and survey the competition and began to feel very comfortable about Artisan House's niche — that is, when he wasn't hearing about its problems.

“I sat here at this very table at the first market, with the customers lined up to the door waiting to tell me about orders from the last market that never got processed, wrong items that were shipped out over and over,” he said. “Plus, quality was a problem, the art designs were tired, the catalog was several years old, the Web site was ancient.”

Some of those problems were easy fixes, but some weren't. Shilling's first and biggest challenge was to get Artisan House's balance sheet back in order. “I had all these bills the previous owner hadn't paid. I talked to the vendors, put them on payment plans… we owed UPS something like $80,000 due to a mistake someone had made in shipping rates.

“I paid off at least $200,000 worth of debt plus invested in the inventory to build stock so we could ship immediately.” The inventory investment came at the advice of the company's sales reps. “I focused very hard on that and it took us a couple of years, but now every item we carry is available for immediate shipment.”

Shilling also came up with a long punch list. “I prioritized what needed to be done and gave the people the resources they needed to do it … like another shift of workers, or Jay Mortensen.”

Mortensen, a design consultant from Chicago, was brought to Shilling's attention by Connie Rayburn, VP of sales and marketing, and brought into the company to infuse some new ideas and energy. “We hired Jay as a consultant and he worked with our artists giving them color and trend ideas. Jay would come to High Point and walk us around different places just to get inspiration. 'Look at this sofa, at this color …' and it was remarkable what happened after that: The next introduction was totally different.”

Since then, Artisan House's collection has expanded into new directions but Shilling points out that most of the creators behind those designs are still the same artists, welders and shop people from 2001. “Connie (Rayburn) is new and I'm new but that's about it. I don't really do all that much … give them things to do and keep them going, but I do try to resist the temptation to do too many things at once. That's really important because we're a small company and we just can't hit it all. I waited five years for the Web site to get done. It was awful but I just didn't have the resources to do it and I knew that we'd get to it and we did and it's really nice now. So we're on to the next thing.”

That “next thing” is a focus on international business. “We have a very successful distributor in the UK who's been with us for a while. We got into the John Lewis department store chain and our business just took off there. We just set up our first office overseas and we hired someone this month to be our director of European sales.” The company also just signed a distributor in China.

“Our art fits into any culture,” Schilling said. “You know, I think maybe half our sales should come from offshore at some point — maybe in two or three years if things go the way I want.”