Callus treatment: Century Furniture believes the best way to beat back mass-produced imports is to deal with things at hand.

• Author: Murray, Arthur O.

Don't come to Century Furniture looking for low prices. That's not how the company has operated since 1947, when Harley Ferguson Shuford Sr. started it in Hickory. It has always concentrated on high-end pieces made by skilled craftsmen.

And that's how it plans to survive. In an industry that has lost more than 27% of its 78,765 jobs in North Carolina since 1993--mostly because of wider availability of cheap imports--Century knows it can't cut quality to snip prices, Ed Tashjian, vice president of marketing, says. Century employs about 1,420, roughly the same as 10 years ago, most of them in its 600,000-square-foot case-goods factory.

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Century's furniture costs more--and looks and works better--because of the way it's made, Tashjian says. "Our products are made in lots of five to 20 by teams of skilled workers, not on an assembly line. There's nobody just screwing in a screw all day long."

Precision hinges, complex finishes and sophisticated carving are just a few of the things that set Century pieces apart from imports. "Unless it's an exact copy of ours--and that's been known to happen--the people in Asia have a great deal of difficulty with scale and proportion. They're scaled for...