By Janet Weyandt
When Dave Jahnke was 22 years old, he took a job with a company called Anderson Lake Industries in Suring. The company had recently moved into a new facility — a repurposed old country store — from a garage that belonged to the father of the company founder.
The company’s main product was equipment for science classrooms: drying racks for test tubes, meter sticks and tables.
Within his first year, someone handed Jahnke a few pages out of a science classroom furniture catalog and asked him to see if he could improve upon some of the products. He did, and before long, the company was working in tandem with other Midwestern businesses that also produced items for science classrooms.
“Our product line just kept expanding,” says Jahnke, who left the company in 2017 after 33 years and came back in February of this year as president. “Our focus started in the science area and for many, many years stayed in the science area.”
Products such as four-student workstations with sinks and gas fixtures, rolling mobile lab carts and teacher demo desks fueled the company’s growth through the 1990s, and then a new era of growth started with the 1998 arrival of sales manager Julie Ryno.
Ryno, who is set to retire at the end of the year, put a lot of emphasis on expanding Diversified Woodcrafts, as it was then called, into the catalog market, and that made a huge difference for the company, Jahnke says.
“All of a sudden, we were selling product into catalogs around the country,” he says. “She was instrumental in developing the product we have in the catalog side from then until now. She took us to companies around the country; she got our products into these catalogs.”
In 2006, the company entered the casework industry with its Diversified Casework brand. Casework includes cabinets and shelving for science classrooms. It was a big addition — casework is heavy-duty cabinetry and shelving, usually fixed to the walls and able to withstand exposure to chemicals and heavy usage over a period of years, Jahnke says.
“That’s sold differently,” he says. “They look like kitchen cabinets, but they’re built to be institutional grade. While at first glance they might look like kitchen cabinets, it’s an institutional product that’s built totally differently. That product is sold through regional dealers. That was new for our business to get into.”
About five years later, the company expanded into high-end laboratory furniture and devised a new brand — OC River, named for the Oconto River that flows through Suring.
The difference between Diversified Casework’s products and OC River’s products is the end user: “Casework is going into high schools in any town in Wisconsin — there’s state and federal budgeting,” Jahnke says. “OC River typically goes into a science building on a campus with somebody’s name on the side of it. Somebody’s writing a personal check.”
The OC River products are manufactured in the same facility, but they go through a different design process and are sold differently, Jahnke says.
A third brand under the Diversified umbrella is Diversified Spaces, which caters mainly to middle and high schools. Its focus is on “creating innovative makerspaces, robotics and STEAM learning spaces,” the company said in announcing the brand. It works with communities and architects in the planning of new schools and produces replacement tables and other products.
In 2016, Diversified Casework purchased a competitor, Sheldon Labs in Mississippi, and this year consolidated manufacturing operations in Wisconsin. The company also is preparing to expand into De Pere, adding office and warehouse space there. Expansion means jobs, and Jahnke says the company is looking to add to its 160-person workforce in nearly every department.
The company also brought in a new group president, Robert Graumann, who is spearheading an alignment between Diversified Woodcrafts and two other companies in similar industries that share the same owner.
Diversified Woodcrafts and the brands under its umbrella differentiate themselves through the comprehensive way they get their products in front of potential customers.
“As a manufacturer, we’re unique in that we sell through the catalog and the casework side,” Jahnke says. “We have competitors on the casework side that don’t do any of the transactional catalog side. Some competitors don’t get into the very high-end OC River market. We have products for all the different opportunities we have. We’re in a growing environment.”
diversifiedwoodcrafts.com
