The later dispute with her father kept her from needing to find the answer. Since the age of eighteen, she had not set foot in the factory. She never saw any of the old employees again until the day of the funeral, except for one. She had met him about a year after the dispute, at the music conservatory where she taught. She hadn’t recognized the man in his street clothes, and her embarrassment about this increased tenfold when he introduced himself by saying, “I belong to the H. Rami company, I’m one of your father’s employees.” She realized in that moment that one day she would have to deal with this guilt about class, which is how she described her feelings to herself.
She lifts her head and takes a deep breath to clear her memories. Her thoughts dissolve into the sounds of musical instruments tuning up. The first notes of a Schubert sonata come back to her, but discordant. She is impatient to begin rehearsals with the string orchestra for the end-of-year concert, impatient to return to an atmosphere where people work together and strive for harmony with a healthy respect for each other’s talents. She rises briskly and exits the office, leaving the sheaf of papers behind. Hubert’s face imposes itself suddenly in her mind. If Thierry doesn’t come back, she will transfer control of the company to Hubert. After all he had done for its growth, it would only be fair. And too bad if her father turned over in his grave.
FRIDAY. 9:00 A.M. Héloïse slowly parks her car in the spot next to those of Hubert and the two workshop supervisors. She notices with a forced indifference that Thierry’s parking spot is still conspicuously empty.
“If this keeps up much longer,” she thinks to herself, “weeds will start growing there.”
She makes for the door with an air of self-assurance. Today, she wears her usual clothes: a long skirt of soft cloth and a short forest-green vest that shows her braided strawberry blonde hair to its best advantage. In fact, she is dressed for her second meeting of the day: lunch with the director of the music conservatory. They will be discussing her teaching responsibilities for the upcoming year. Her morning meeting with Hubert shouldn’t last long.
“Good morning, Hubert,” she greets him, trying to sound lighthearted.
“Good morning, Héloïse,” Hubert replies in a serious tone that she does her best to ignore.
“How was your trip to Saint-Nazaire?”
“Not good. Not only was I unable to get the chair order back, but I also discovered we are off their list of preferred suppliers for the rest of the year—off the list of our biggest customer! Their young purchaser stuck us with a failing grade when he did his evaluation, and there was nothing my friend Durois could do. This means we’ll have to renegotiate all our contracts with them, and it will take at least a year to reach the same level of sales with this line of products.”
Héloïse motions to Hubert to sit in one of the metal chairs by the small table, and takes a seat opposite him. He looks overwhelmed, and Héloïse gives him her undivided attention as he continues.
“This is very bad news. But, to be honest, it doesn’t surprise me. As you know, we have three product lines. The first is the ‘Catamer’ line, consisting of chairs, tables, and armchairs for luxury pleasure craft like the ones built in the shipyards at Saint-Nazaire. These are the upscale products we have always produced. They have made the company’s reputation due to their consistent high quality. We design and make them ‘to order’ based on the customer’s design and schedule. We have several customers in Saint-Nazaire, and they all know each other, as they meet in the shipyards. Our competitive advantage was largely due to the talents of your father and Roger to choose just the right type of wood to make our creations unique, even if the designs are more or less the same over the years. But more and more customers lose patience when we don’t deliver on time and charge us a penalty since they have to pay for the dry dock time. This product line is our most important in terms of revenue and margin.”
Hubert stops for a moment to let Héloïse absorb this information. She just sits there, impassively. He carries on.
“Then we have chairs, tables, and desks for community-use buildings like schools, cafeterias, and students’ and seniors’ residences. This product line, called ‘Collectivité,’ is high-volume, with inexpensive products. We make them ‘to stock’ because the customer lead time—I mean the time the customer is willing to wait—is shorter than our cumulative lead time—the time needed to get the material and make the products. The prices are practically set in advance because these are institutional customers. We don’t make a great deal of money on this product line because of our distribution costs. Our competitive advantage is the agility of a small company. We are able to meet very short last-minute deadlines for very diverse volume requests. In this product line, our customer service level is better than our competitors’—even though, to be frank, it is not very good. We do intense and expensive firefighting to react to those orders. I made a copy of the summary of these competitive advantages by product line for you. Thierry asked me to do this for him since it has something to do with how he organizes the supply chain.” Hubert pushes a paper toward Héloïse and continues.
“Finally, your father developed the ‘Boutique’ line. These metal-and-wood products are custom-made for boutiques selling ready-to-wear, ecologically sustainable clothing. We were able to break through in this market thanks to our reputation for high quality, and we were able to gain a substantial market share by undercutting our competition, without even intending to do so. However, these customers really care more about our delivery time and reliability than they do about price. We design and make this furniture ‘to order,’ based partly on standardized sub-assemblies that we combine with elements—such as airconditioning and sound systems—furnished by the customer. We install the whole thing in the customer’s store only when the boutique is completely ready.
“Your father was proud of this product line, because it was he who had opened up this new market, thanks to Thierry, I suppose. Thierry convinced us all that we could expand in this market, especially in retail chains. We could produce some sub-assemblies ‘to stock’ in order to shorten the customer lead time. Customized assemblies could then be done ‘to order’—and in record time, since we would be able to break down the process into two independent steps.”
Héloïse looks surprised. Hubert carries on, with a wave of his hand, as if to push the whole idea aside for the time being.
“Anyway, I’m not sure how this would really work since we didn’t reach that stage. Your father first met Thierry Ambi at a furniture trade show. The problem is that we don’t really know the boutique market. We lose a great deal of time when installing on-site. The architects’ drawings use approximate measures that are difficult for our shop people to read and translate into part specifications. We’ve lost money on all Boutique orders up to now. As a consequence, your father wanted to cut corners on the Catamer line to balance the loss on the Boutique line—as though the Catamer orders would continue to stream in all by themselves, no matter what the quality.”
There is bitterness in Hubert’s voice, and it makes Héloïse feel ill at ease to hear it. She knows full well that it was Hubert who had won the orders for the Catamer line during the early years of his collaboration with her father. It had certainly been easy enough for him to come into contact with potential customers, since most of his wealthy relatives and friends owned yachts. All Hubert had to do was spend a Sunday hunting with one or another of them. After an excellent meal, it was rare for someone to not let himself be convinced to buy something from this young socialite who was actually involved with a business start-up. Much of Henri’s rise from son of a craftsman to successful businessman was due in large measure to Hubert’s skills as a salesman.
Hubert