Dream weaver wins blanket approval.

• Position: President of both Beacon Manufacturing Co. and Wiscassett Mills Co. Randall Chestnut - People

Randall Chestnut didn't join Beacon Manufacturing Co. in Swannanoa to work with an exciting product: "Basically, if you get quite blunt about it, the blanket industry is as boring as can be," he admits. But working for takeover maverick David Murdock can't be dull.

Chestnut is president of Murdock's two remaining textile enterprises, Beacon and Wiscassett Mills Co., a sister yarn plant in Albemarle. At Beacon, he has been jazzing up his line of goods, coming out with a foot-warmer blanket that's twice as thick at the bottom and, for a more meaningful relationship, a side-by-side model twice as heavy on the cold-natured side of the bed.

"We've been able to get three patents, which is something you just don't do in the blanket industry," he says. "We're creative, innovative and have done new things."

One of them has been to improve sales. Beacon's once-dominant market share has rebounded from 22% to 30% in the adult market and from 33% to 45% in the infant market. In an often-sleepy industry, Beacon's sales grew 12% from 1989 to 1991, Chestnut notes. He says sales exceed $100 million a year.

Once a family business, Beacon moved down from New Bedford, Mass., in the 1930s. Its 60-year-old mill, in a broad mountain valley near Asheville, became a red-brick stepchild of Cannon Mills in '81. Murdock inherited Beacon when he bought the textile giant in 1982. When he sold Cannon to Eden-based Fieldcrest Mills in 1988, nobody wanted Beacon's...