Indianapolis – Industry veteran Spencer
Kalker is resurrecting Custom Woodwork & Design (CWD), the maker of custom-built
made-to-order home-theater furniture.
Kalker will bring CWD’s first new
product in years to the CEDIA Expo.
Kalker is president and founder
of ImageCrafters, which launched in 1997 as a designer of showrooms and
fixtures for A/V dealers. He is also one of the original co-founders of CWD,
which opened its doors in 1976. In 1997, CWD was sold to a company that soon
folded, taking CWD with it.
Kalker said he sold off CWD in
1997 because, like the “vast majority of woodworking businesses in the U.S. in
the late 1990s, it struggled to be profitable.” He cited high material and
labor costs and low-cost offshore products.
In resurrecting CWD, Kalker is working
with a Pennsylvania factory that has been making custom-built displays for his ImageCrafters
company for 10 years. That company is a “well-financed, highly skilled
family-owned U.S. factory,” he said.
The CWD product making its debut
at the Expo is billed as the industry’s first computer-audio-ready A/V
credenza.
