Featured in Edge Magazine Dr. Bob Weiner, makes life a little less shocking everyday. Literally. In addition to developing a myriad of patents as well as some of the most well known and used techniques and processes employed by the post-industrial age, global carpet manufacturing industry, he figured out a way to reduce static electricity in carpeting. That was just the begining...
There’s something undeniably endearing, if not inspiring, about a 71-year-old man who still gets worked up about his life’s work.
“I’ve had a lot of exciting moments,” the man says with an easy vitality. “I still get excited when I walk into a building that has my carpet on the floor. It’s pretty distinctive.”
“That’s really true,” he insists, as if we don’t quite believe him. “There’s a real feeling of accomplishment when you see someone actually using your product successfully. That’s a big deal.”
After completing his breakfast, he makes a few calls from his sometimes home in Carmel, California, simultaneously surveying the spectacular Pacific view. It would take a crowbar to pry most people away from that view, especially most people of a certain age.
But Dr. Bob Weiner is not most people. An innovator in the commercial carpet manufacturing industry for more than 40 years, Dr. Weiner has enjoyed the view of that industry reserved for only its most successful players.
Designs from Harbinger and Prince Street and Constantine, his three Georgia-based enterprises, have consistently been the top choice of discerning architects and designers for decades; under his technological leadership, his mills were among the first to introduce skein dyed yarns to the industry.
“That’s dyed yarn that look like woven carpet,” Dr. Weiner explains patiently to the uninitiated. “They were suitable for Holiday Inns and Hiltons, places like that. We had quite a bit of business that was hospitality industry.
“I picked an industry that, even in the early days, was already pretty developed,” he continues, mentally surveying the span of his oceanic career.
“At one time, carpet was the most entrepreneurial industry in the country. In the 1970s, there were more millionaires per capita in Dalton, Georgia than in any other city in America,” he says of the home base of his past and future success. “Everybody who had a tufting machine made a million dollars!”
“If you do something creative in an industry, even it is already relatively mature, there is still plenty of opportunity to make your mark. And that is exciting.”
After earning a PhD in physical chemistry in 1970 from Purdue University, Dr. Weiner was lead to pursue a career in fiber research and development—by a coin toss.
“It was either ion technology, or fibers,” he says, casually unimpressed that his extraordinary career had once hinged on heads or tails.
Heads. It was fibers.
“I didn’t know anything about fibers,” he recalls of his first job as a researcher at Rohm and Hass, a manufacturing company in Philadelphia. “My theoretical thesis was totally unrelated to anything: The Structure of Gaseous Molecules,” he says, chuckling. “I can’t even read that thesis anymore, but that’s another story.”
Absorbing the rudiments of carpet manufacturing, Dr. Weiner eventually helped developed a system that reduced static in carpeting, a formidable discovery, as will testify anyone who has ever flipped on a wall light switch in his stocking feet on a dry winter’s night. But that is not the discovery Dr. Weiner considers his most formidable.
Predictably, Haas’s product meetings would find Dr. Weiner in the middle of battles between executives from the manufacturing and the marketing departments.
“I was just one of the research people, a little lower on the scale at that point. I didn't call myself an executive,” he recalls.
One particular product wasn’t moving well, Weiner recalls—a carpet yarn that had an innate flaw in the design.
“It trapped dirt more than released it! You try to make soil-hiding or soil-repelling fibers, not soil attracting fibers!” he says with the amusement that only comes 40 years hence. “The marketing guys are screaming at the manufacturing guys: ’You guys can’t make anything that’s saleable! There’s no way to get anybody to pay anything for this stuff!’
“And the manufacturing people were screaming at the marketing people: ‘You guys couldn’t sell water in the desert! What we give you, you give it away! No wonder we don’t make any money!’”
Observing this left brain/right brain conundrum as it played out before his very eyes like a mad symphony, Dr. Weiner says he was struck by a moment of clarity that would serve him throughout those coming forty years.
“I’m sitting there thinking, if one single brain understood both what the marketplace wants out of a product and is willing to pay a significant premium for, and at the same time understood the manufacturing necessary to create that product without onerous manufacturing costs, overwhelming inventory, or problems, and that product were presentable…. If just one single brain could understand both sides of that fence, we could be successful.”
Understanding that simple concept, that crescendo, Dr. Weiner says, was the springboard of his manufacturing success: The was all about balance.
“That’s where it all started—just understanding both parts of what it takes to bring something to market, and make it, and service that market, and be successful in that market.”
He applies his mantra, ‘The Best Product Wins,’ to all aspects of his life, whether professional or personal.
“It just seems to me to be the logical thing. If you’re presenting products to somebody who’s going to choose a product for a project—a law firm, or a store’s floor, or hotel corridors, or whatever, a museum, it doesn’t matter—the products have got to have some of their own, innate pizzazz. The products have got to be a cut above in the designers’ eyes.
“It’s simple: the best product wins.”