New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
‘Transformation has brought us here’
GE Appliances to open manufacturing center in state
STAMFORD — For generations, General Electric small appliances were made in Fairfield County. Now, decades after the end of that era, the business is reviving its manufacturing presence in southwestern Connecticut.
GE Appliances, which is now owned by Chinese consumer-goods company Haier, announced Monday plans to open next year a small-appliances “microfactory” at 49 John St., in Stamford’s South End. The manufacturing will anchor a sprawling 67,000-squarefoot facility known as CoCREATE Stamford, which company officials also envision as a hub for collaboration with colleges and universities and as a public showcase for their products.
“We’ve been under a business transformation at GE Appliances, and it’s guided by a philosophy we like to call ‘zero distance,’ ” CEO and President Kevin Nolan, a Stamford native, told several-dozen attendees during a press conference inside 49 John St. “That transformation has brought us here. To be zero distance means we have to be with our customers.”
CoCREATE will mark the first complex in Connecticut for the Louisville, Ky.-headquartered GE Appliances — with plans to initially create 25 jobs at the new site. It will operate in a now-empty space that formerly housed a warehouse for furnisher Lillian August.
GE Appliances plans to launch production next spring at 49 John St., making products such as the Monogram Smart Flush Hearth Oven. It will then open other sections including a community makerspace, product showrooms, and a “heritage center” focusing on the area’s manufacturing history. The company expects the site to be fully operational by late next year.
Its Stamford microfactory will complement production facilities in Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. In total, the company employs about 14,000.
“This is a very powerful partnership,” said Peter Denious, CEO and president of AdvanceCT, an economic developmentfocused nonprofit. “As the state’s private-sector, economic-development partner, we at AdvanceCT get out and tell the Connecticut story every day — to share the stories of the incredible companies doing business here, our talented workforce and the cuttingedge innovation that’s going on in our great state.”
The expansion to Connecticut reflects GE Appliances’ announcement last year that it would return to manufacturing and selling small appliances after 35 years. Its lineup now includes coffee makers, toasters, toaster ovens, blenders and food processors. GE Appliances are used in more than 50 percent of homes in the U.S., according to company data.
GE has roots in Conn.
In a period running approximately from the 1920s to the 1980s, GE small appliances were manufactured in Bridgeport, according to company officials. In 2016, Haier acquired GE Appliances for $5.4 billion from GE. Also in 2016, GE announced the relocation of its headquarters from Fairfield to Boston.
While Stamford’s largest employers today operate in industries such as consumer goods, financial services, health care and media, it has a long manufacturing history. The Yale & Towne lock company inspired Stamford’s Lock City nickname. After its late 1860s relocation to Stamford, Yale dominated local manufacturing for about a century.
“We have an incredible entrepreneurial tradition in this state,” said Gov. Ned Lamont. “We have a great history here, and then we became the land of steady habits. And steady habits
are great in marital relationships, but when it comes to an entrepreneurial economy, you’ve got to kickstart every once in a while. From my point of view, that’s what CoCREATE Stamford and GE Appliances are doing right here.”
State officials said GE Appliances is not receiving any state funding to support its multimillion-dollar investment in CoCREATE. But the state’s support of the project was reflected in the attendance of Lamont, Denious and David Lehman, the state’s economic development commissioner.
Lehman said he and Denious connected with GE Appliances officials through a referral from AdvanceCT.
“They were looking in other places in Connecticut and other places along the northeast (Interstate) 95 corridor,” Lehman told Hearst Connecticut Media. “My recollection is that in the serious conversations, when we got down to potential buildings and potential sites, the focus was primarily Stamford.”
Nolan noted that “I’ve
been watching what’s going on in Connecticut. Hats off to the governor, universities and school systems. There are so many things that are happening here. If you look at Stamford today, versus what I remember when I grew up here, and it is a totally different place.”
Focus on education
In addition to manufacturing, GE Appliances officials said they want CoCREATE to become a nexus for hands-on learning. The company will partner with the University of Connecticut and Connecticut State Colleges & Universities systems to provide opportunities through co-op programs and other initiatives for students interested in fields such as manufacturing and engineering.
“We believe deeply in the governor’s vision and the vision that all of you have to develop this state and ‘kickstart it,’ as the governor said. We believe you do that in collaboration with higher education,” said Andrew Agwunobi, UConn’s interim president. “It’s also self-serving for us
and our students because Stamford is an amazing campus that has so much potential for the growth of UConn in the future.”
CSCU, which includes 12 community colleges and four state universities, does not have a campus in Stamford. But CSCU President Terrence Cheng said the system could become a major talent pipeline for GE Appliances.
“Even though we don’t have a campus here in Stamford, we have campuses across the state,” said Cheng, who formerly served as the director of the UConn-Stamford campus. “That means we have power, potential and capacity across the state that we seek to bring to bear in an initiative such as this — to be able to say ‘if GE Appliances want some of the best advanced-manufacturing students that Connecticut has to offer, then we have that wealth of talent in our community-college system alone.’ ”
Nolan, a UConn alumnus, said the company’s bullishness about its higher-education partnerships in Connecticut is based on
the impact of the companysupported FirstBuild “cocreation center” opened several years ago on the campus of the University of Louisville.
“Every day, we’re in with students, community members and the public, coming together and creating new things,” Nolan said. “It has really taken our company and our innovation and just accelerated it like we could never believe before.”
The CEO also cited his optimism about forging closer relationships with the public through hubs such as the makerspace and product showrooms. The showrooms will offer programming such as cooking classes.
“Most companies still want to have an old playbook of ‘let’s sit and do research, let’s be secretive, let’s not talk,’ ” Nolan said. “You’ll be able to come in here, and you’ll be able to see what we’re thinking and projecting into the future.”