Priming For Perfection

By Sharon Spielman

Since 1945, Brown Jordan has designed luxury leisure furnishings and accessories that “transcend time and liberate the senses.” Established by Robert Brown and Hubert Jordan in Pasadena, Calif., Brown Jordan was the first company to create furniture for full-time outdoor use. The first of these innovative designs, constructed of tubular aluminum and vinyl lace, was fittingly called “Leisure” and marked the birthplace of outdoor furniture.

Today, the company offers several lines of high end furniture, but the lines we will focus on here are those that are powder coated aluminum at their production plant in Juarez, Mexico.

About four years ago, Brown Jordan began to have concerns with color consistency from their key suppliers. According to Mike Dilcher, marketing and business development manager at Sherwin-Williams it was on a routine sales call with Oscar Garcia, a local sales rep from El Paso, Texas, that Brown Jordan challenged the powder maker to formulate a specific color that would be consistent from batch to batch, color to color, over time.

When a customer buys patio furniture, they may buy a table and four chairs and then come back a year later and may want to add another couple of chairs. “Obviously the consistency over time has to be there or the customer is not going to be happy,” Dilcher says. “Especially with Brown Jordan; their products are extremely high end—people buy it expecting a great deal out of the furniture and finish.”

According to Randy Shorts, Brown Jordan’s general manager, it was during that sales call by one of their regular powder suppliers, Sherwin- Williams, that the furniture maker offered the powder supplier the opportunity to help.

“We had been buying powder from several suppliers for a number of years—Sherwin-Williams being one of those suppliers,” Shorts explains. “Three or four years ago we starting running into some consistency problems with our powders, so I turned to Sherwin-Williams and explained the situation. ‘Ya know,’ I said, ‘you have an opportunity here to get yourself in here as our lead supplier.’ So, they marched in with their troops. They saw the opportunity and they took the task on full board,” Shorts says. 

Sherwin-Williams was able to duplicate the color that Brown Jordan was having the consistency issues with after a few tries, according to Shorts. “It was a very difficult color, you understand,” he says. Known in the industry as a “spice” color, Shorts says that Sherwin- Williams was very successful in getting exactly the right color. “We were extremely pleased with the outstanding results,” Shorts reveals.

So Brown Jordan decided to work together with Sherwin-Williams on another issue that had begun to creep up. “In the past we could see some corrosion failure or at least corrosion breech,” Shorts explains. It is crucial for Brown Jordan to be able to offer their high end customers an exceptional product so, together, the two companies developed a proprietary hybrid-based epoxy polyester primer to go under the final powder coating finish.

Again, the results were outstanding, according to Shorts. “We’ve had zero—absolutely zero— field failures due to corrosion,” he says. “We use that primer on every piece of aluminum that is going to be powder coated— 100 percent.”

The Powder Line

In addition to having the perfect primer and powder, Brown Jordan utilizes what they believe is the perfect powder coating line to create its high end patio furniture. To achieve these results, the facility uses a fivestage chromate-based pretreatment system from Chemetall. Stages 1 and 2 are for washing the parts, which are hung by specialized hooks attached to an I-beam conveyor. Stage 3 of the pretreatment process is where the chromate is applied. This is followed by a rinse in stage 4 and a shedding agent in stage 5. Then the parts are blown off in a convection oven to dry the frames. This step also helps heat the parts to get them ready to accept the primer, which is applied in a small Nordson booth at the next step. A thin layer of primer is all it takes—applied and cured using a proprietary process to start the crosslinking—to ensure a weather-resistant, high-end result. After the primer step, the parts travel through another convection oven.

Shorts explains that all the powder at Brown Jordan is manually applied. “We had tried to use automated guns to help supplement some of what we were applying, but we change colors 30 times a day so that just wasn’t feasible. We do not recover any paint. The way we prefer to run our process is that because of the lead times we give our customers we cannot really recycle any of our colors. The Nordson auto adjusting guns really help alleviate the amount of powder that is sprayed to waste,” Shorts explains. After the final color is applied, the parts are cured in the third convection oven. After cure, there is a cool down period and then inspection. “Given who we are in our industry, our product must achieve perfection. We have a very, very stringent inspection process, and we tolerate absolutely zero blemishes. When Mike first started visiting the facility regularly, he would shake his head and be like, ‘Really, you are going to reject that?’ We do our fair share of re-sprays because Brown Jordan looks for the perfection of our product…our customers demand it.”

Reaching Out

Although high end resorts and upscale retailers make up the majority of Brown Jordan’s customers, the furniture maker has recently begun to expand its customer base. In a press release issued by Brown Jordan on March 6, 2012, the company announced that it partnered with a leader in eCommerce software and solutions to develop the company’s first eCommerce web site. “We are thrilled to bring our luxury brand to consumers around the globe via the Internet,” says Bill Snow, Brown Jordan’s chief information officer. “We are eager to expand our business reach through online distribution, and it is positioned to create synergies with our existing sales channels including the retail, designer and contract markets,” he adds.

Reaching out via the Internet is effective. If you are a fan of playing games on social networking sites such as Facebook, chances are you will see a pop-up ad like the one that caught this writer’s eye. In between a play of Words With Friends, Brown Jordan’s ad popped up, and you better believe I clicked on it.

Sharon Spielman is editor of Powder Coated Tough magazine. She can be reached at 847-302-2648 or via email at sspielman@powdercoating.org.