History
The company was started as a housewares manufacturer in 1932, then bought a bankrupt furniture factory in Beecher Falls, Vermont in 1936. The firm adopted the name "Ethan Allen" for its early-American furniture introduced in 1939. It was named after the Vermont Revolutionary leader.
In 1972 Ethan Allen moved its headquarters from New York City to Danbury, CT. The Ethan Allen International Headquarters Complex includes the Ethan Allen Hotel, corporate headquarters offices, and an interior design center. The firm was sold in 1980 to Interco for $150 million, though Ancell remained an advisor. The company was sold again in 1989 to a management group headed by current Chairman, President, and CEO Farooq Kathwari. In 1993 the company went public to help raise $156.9 million through the sale of common stock.
In 2008, the company announced plans to close a dozen Design Centers. The decision was made to consolidate the Design Centers with others that were currently serving the same market area.
More than seventy percent of its cherry, maple and alder wood pieces are crafted in the United States. Towards the end of 2008 Ethan Allen began selling their products online.
In 2009, the company laid off 238 workers from Beecher Falls, Vermont. 93 workers remained. Later in the year, the plant ceased operation. In 2009, Ethan Allen closed the Eldred, PA manufacturing plant.
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
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—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)