Pot calling the kettle blue.

• Author: Murphy, Scott
• Position: General Houseware Corp.'s "blue-granite" cookware - Company Profile

Pot Calling the Kettle Blue

Answer this. You're the president of a cookware company that needs to streamline its operation. You begin a program of consolidation, combining factories and selling off investments outside your cookware business. Now, to save even more money, you'd like to move your corporate headquarters away from the East Coast. The question is, where in the country do you go?

Terre Haute, of course. That's where Paul A. Saxton, president and recently named CEO of General Housewares Corp., decided to move his top executives in June of last year.

"We wanted our headquarters to be located in the same building as one of our factories," Saxton says. "Here we have office space and could release our rented property in Stamford, Conn. We're operating at a lower cost."

Saxton says the days are long gone when large cities were the ticket to big

business.

"Proximity is no longer relevant," he says. "We can talk to New York about a legal document with a phone, fax and computer screen and have everything signed in two days. The place to run a profitable business is no longer in big places. It's in small places."

And profitable it has been. An annual revenue of nearly $69 million in 1990 placed GHC 55th on Indiana Business Magazine's list of the state's top public companies.

GHC's factory in Terre Haute is the only remaining domestic producer of "blue granite" cookware, the ceramic-on-steel pots and pans used by U.S. families since the 19th century.

Under GHC's direction since 1967, the factory has been making ceramic-on-steel cookware since it was built in 1901. Though the enameled steel material was used heavily in cooking utensils, hospital sanitary ware and chamber pots in the early 1900s, its demand has decreased with the advent of plastics and stainless steel. Today, Terre Haute feeds the remaining need for blue granite roasters and canners. It also produces chamber pots for the three out of...