Berea College Crafts' (BCC) mission is to maintain two strong traditions for the Berea (Ky.) College community: preserve Appalachian crafts and provide jobs for students.

Berea is a four-year liberal arts college that employs students in craftworks and other disciplines to raise funds to operate the school instead of charging tuition. According to Terry Fields, BCC production manager, the school has been producing crafts since 1893. Students earn money for other educational expenses, such as room, board and books. Today, with the average cost of educating a four-year college student around $30,000, according to Fields, Berea remains free for those willing to work for an education.

In the college's four manufacturing facilities and two retail stores - which span 50,000 square feet - BCC expects to bring in $1.5 million gross sales for the school in 2006 through its own stores, 500 distributors across the country, the annual catalog and through the organization's Web site. Wood crafts account for 75 percent of craft revenue.

“We're most proud of Berea's ability to preserve Appalachian culture and tradition that these products represent,” Fields says. “It is a satisfying feeling to produce high-quality products with part-time students. We're proud of the process we've been able to establish.”

Fields shared his thoughts with Manufacturing Today recently on competition from imported crafts, the appeal of BCC's unique background and how production remains steady with a majority of its employees working only part time.

Manufacturing Today: How do your customers define quality?
Terry Fields: Most of our customers are looking for hand-made crafts, so in that respect our product has individuality to it. They can tell whether it is hand-made, hand-rubbed and well-made, or if it's a mass-produced assembly product.

MT: How is the market changing?
TF: There is more and more competition all the time, particularly in the area of producing traditional crafts. We see good, quality products being imported, which is certainly a growing concern. Up until the last few years, it was not a concern because of the difference in quality. It was difficult to produce our products because of the amount of labor involved in hand-made products, so it was hard to compete. But the market is changing in that respect.

MT: How is the organization adapting to this?
TF: We're talking more and more about the college education and our mission to educate students. We're telling our story more and more with the hopes customers will buy products in large degree in support of the mission of our college.

Once a conversation begins about us, it is very intriguing. We will display written materials and talk about the students making the products, and they will still talk about our students and their work at Berea College in someone else's retail store.

MT:How are these products made?
TF: We buy the raw materials for all areas and we process in batch products. We're not set up as an assembly line because we are responding to small orders and there is also the training aspect of students. The biggest challenge we have is training students that work 10 hours a week to produce the high-quality product we have a tradition of producing.

We are constantly training. Students come in as freshmen and few have seen the inside of a shop, so we usually start at ground zero. Hopefully, the students will stay with us even though they have the option to change and take a job elsewhere during their upperclassman years. As the students progress through their career here, they become productive. Until then, there is more training than productivity.

MT:How does BCC improve the manufacturing quality?
TF: In continuation with the training mission, we are working closer with our academic technology department to recruit students going through industrial technology in formal classes to greatly improve productivity and maintain our manufacturing quality.

MT: How does BCC maintain and improve its productivity?
TF: We have a good computer software program to maintain our inventory of finished products from a historical perspective. Another challenge is that so much of our business is in November and December, so we have to anticipate what we likely are going to sell.