by Jess McCuan
photography by Stewart O'Shields / artistic direction and garments by R. Brooke Priddy of Ship to Shore

The story of the Oriole Mill is in many ways a business story. In this story, the mill, a 72,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in an old brick building on the north edge of downtown Hendersonville, represents many things. First, it’s a rare textile startup in a time when globalization and the growth of companies like Wal-Mart have moved more and more textile jobs overseas. Second, it represents both an old way of doing things and a new one, with its relatively small staff making designer products like Egyptian cotton duvet covers on rapidly-disappearing equipment. Third, because the mill’s founders, Bethanne Knudson and Stephan Michelson, have so much at stake in the business—around $5 million, to be exact—the building and all its giant, intricate machinery seem to represent the leap any entrepreneurs take when they pour money and sweat equity into
a risky venture

You might also argue that the saga of the mill is a love story. Michelson and Knudson met 11 years ago when he was 60 and she was 36. They never married but seem to trust each other completely as both life partners and business partners in such a high-stakes undertaking. The mill is a labor of love for Knudson, who has been enthralled with the art and science of weaving all her life. For Michelson, who has had a high-profile career in a separate field, the mill seems to represent a chance to make a tangible product that he and others see as being of real worth.

In 1996, Bethanne Knudson found herself at loose ends. She’d taught textiles courses at the University of Kansas, University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere—from fine-art fabrics to dye chemistry to the science of weaving on floor looms. She’d just finished teaching a summer session at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, ended a relationship and was looking for a change. Friends of hers, a glassblower and his wife, in Bat Cave, North Carolina, needed help editing software programs that textile mills use to make Jacquard looms weave fabric into different patterns. They invited Knudson to come live with them, help with the project and start a new life.

A Jacquard loom, named for the Frenchman Joseph-Marie Jacquard, is the automated loom he first used in 1804 to make fishing nets. It evolved from punch cards to computer controls, and now many modern industrial textile operations use some version of Jacquard’s system to make, for example, elaborate woven couch covers or tablecloths. Knudson, who has a European air but was born in Kansas, was already a Jacquard loom expert. After a few months working with her friends and then landing a software job in Hickory, North Carolina, she became an expert in tweaking and troubleshooting JacqCAD MASTER, the computer-aided design program that runs looms. She then branched off into consulting, offering Jacquard software technical support for mills and design houses around the country. She traveled constantly, often fetching $500 a day in fees. "My mom even stopped calling me," she says. "I was never home."

By 1998, Knudson had moved to Asheville and started dating Stephan Michelson, a witty, opinionated Stanford-educated economist who had taught at Harvard and the Brookings Institute and made his living running a statistical analysis firm in Washington, D.C. The last straw for Michelson’s big-city life came in 1990 when he looked outside his office window in Tacoma Park, Maryland, and saw someone trying to steal his car. Michelson, also a musician, moved to Hendersonville in 1993, to be near a longtime guitar-playing partner in Polk County.

Knudson knew she had to curtail her ambitious travel schedule. By 1999, she had moved into Michelson’s mountainside home in Hendersonville. Until then, she had been traveling to the mills. Why not have mill employees come to her? In 2000, she opened the Jacquard Center in Hendersonville, a training facility for Jacquard studies. The 6,000-square-foot facility has four fireplaces and a 90-foot deck with mountain views and is as much a retreat as a training center. Knudson charges mill owners $2,500 a week for instructing up to four employees. A client like Coach, the chic Manhattan-based handbag and accessories company, might come to the center for advice on expanding their line to include Jacquard-woven handbags. For Knudson, that can mean teaching anything from basic loom mechanics to the subtleties of getting a manufacturing operation off the ground in Asia. "Some people think I’m evil incarnate for helping them," Knudson says.

In fact, the same year she opened her center, Knudson noticed a precipitous decline in the already-flagging American textile manufacturing industry. Trade magazines reported layoffs and mill closings by the hundreds. She heard from colleagues that big-box retailers were forcing large textile operations overseas, where labor is significantly cheaper. Smaller mills were simply going bankrupt. According the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of American textile mill workers in 2000 was approximately 384,000. Now, there are less than half that many, just 133,000 in 2009. Knudson hopes that someday, her clients won’t choose to manufacture fabric in Asia, even if it’s less expensive. And when they come back to the States, they’ll still need her. "It’s not a bad thing that they’ll see the Oriole Mill and the Jacquard Center as sources of expertise," she says.

Knudson has wanted her own mill for decades. Hand weaving was her first love, and she can get lost for hours talking weaving lingo: warps and wefts, shuttles and shed openings. She had been paying for access to other Western North Carolina mills to do demonstrations, but sometime around 2002, she and Michelson talked seriously about building their own. Knudson would run the mill, and at first, the idea was overwhelming. "There were times I tried to talk him out of it," Knudson says. "I didn’t think I was up to the task." Michelson, for his part, felt in some ways burned by his work as a statistician for law firms. When the numbers didn’t support his clients’ positions or opinions, they often didn’t hire him back—which Michelson found frustrating. "I guess you could say I was looking for a way to build a quality institution, in which the quality would be appreciated by the customers," he says of the mill. He also saw it as an investment in Knudson—a way to let her put years of collected knowledge into practice. "I thought, this is a chance to do something really good."

At first, they wanted to build a mill from scratch. But they spent four years wrangling with the city of Hendersonville and layers of red tape. They needed a zoning change on one property, for example, which required a public meeting in 2004. As Knudson recalls, a group of rude locals organized against them, calling them "big business." "At that moment, I probably would have left Hendersonville," Knudson says. "I really felt unwelcome." In 2006, they paid $2 million for an existing building on Oriole Drive near downtown, a site that had once been a vegetable freezer, seafood plant and, most recently, a carpet manufacturer.

They intended to purchase just three or four Jacquard looms but ended up with nine. They were relatively cheap, as fewer American manufacturers were using them. They also bought six smaller dobby looms (the kind used to make most clothing) and other sewing and finishing tools. The Oriole wove its first fabric in spring 2007.

Their overriding idea, one that makes them different from most textile manufacturers, is that quality will win in the end. Rather than a cheap polyester bedspread, the kind you might find at Target or Kmart for under $100, the Oriole produces a woven reversible bedspread, or coverlet, made of Egyptian cotton and a layer of woven New Zealand wool. It sells for about $600 retail. "We’re high end, but we’re not the highest end," Michelson says, explaining that some deluxe coverlets run more than $1,000. The mill uses some more common fabrics, like cotton and rayon, but also exotic ones, like bamboo, alpaca and mohair. Currently their coverlets, along with duvet covers, throws, shams, shawls and scarves, are sold at around 40 shops, like Homestead in Hendersonville and Porter & Prince in Asheville. Most are within a 100-mile radius of the mill.

The Oriole also hosts artists from around the world. British weaver Ismini Samanidou used an Oriole Jacquard loom to create Timeline, a nine-foot-tall, three-dimensional woven artwork that she displayed at the Jerwood Space art gallery in London this summer.

Whether the couple can make a profit from their business remains to be seen. They’ve kept a crew of three full-time employees and a handful of contractors busy since 2006, but they had to cut their workers’ hours in half in June. It took a $5 million investment to get the mill up and running ($2 million of which is debt). The company must generate between $30,000 and $40,000 a month to break even, according to Michelson. (They’re currently far from that figure, he notes.) One of their challenges is getting their product into the hands of high-end buyers, and they’re trying new marketing strategies. In the meantime, they attended a university seminar for textile manufacturers and were appalled that the teachers basically showed mill operators how to make things cheaper. "What’s the point?" Michelson says. "We’re spending our lives, we’re spending our fortune, we’re spending everything… All the other people we see went into textiles to make money. We went into it to make fabric."

Knudson is technically not an employee of the mill, though she is a founder and spends more than 70 hours a week working there. She has no financial stake in the business but does have nearly everything else at stake in a project that she sees as a chance to prove herself—a culmination of both her years of training and her wildest dreams. "For me, it’s an opportunity of a lifetime," she says. "All I have to do is work as hard as I can for as long as I can. In that sense, it’s more than fair."