Corporate Furniture Veteran Gerry Gatch Joins WallGoldfinger Sales Team
A Toronto native who spent the majority of his career in the contract furniture industry in New York City has joined WallGoldfinger.
Gerry Gatch, now of Burlington, Vt., is the newest vice president of sales at the Randolph, Vt.-based high-end, corporate furniture manufacturer.
Gatch, who earned an industrial design degree from Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology in his native Toronto got his start in the furniture industry right out of college when he went to work for what is now Geiger International.
Gatch had grown up with a father who was interested in building about everything. “I was always repurposing things. I blame my father. He was a jack-of-all-trades and he would teach me things,” recalls Gatch. “Every Saturday morning he would have a project for us.”
That relationship sparked Gatch’s interest in industrial design. Furniture, however, wasn’t foremost on his mind. That is until he went for a job interview at Geiger and got a look at the company’s casegoods. He was immediately intrigued with the furniture’s quality and how it was made.
He spent six years at Geiger in Toronto, Atlanta where he led the effort to develop a new, 120,000-square-foot factory and then New York City as a designer, project manager and in technical sales.
He went on to work for nine years for start-up contract furniture consultant and dealer ManesSpace as a founding partner responsible for technical services and project management and designs.
He then spent more than two decades with contract furniture dealer Meadows Office Interiors also in New York City as a project manager, then design department manager and then director of technical services.
Vermont had always been a vacation spot for Gatch and his family. They visited friends in Burlington and his wife attended the Vermont Quilt Festival in Essex Junction each year. Last year they began wondering: why not make Vermont home?
“The kids had left home. They had left the city,” he says of his now grown son and daughter. “It was just my wife and I, and we thought we always vacation in Vermont so why don’t we move there?”
The couple made the move in January and Gatch went to work at Amoskeag Woodworking in Fairfax as a designer, project manager and in technical sales until joining WallGoldfinger this month.
For Gatch working at WallGoldfinger was not just a career goal, but an ethical decision.
“I knew WallGoldfinger because it built a job for me when I was with ManesSpace, so I knew the quality,” says Gatch, noting in the decades since he had followed WallGoldfinger’s evolution as a foremost maker of corporate furniture and, more importantly for Gatch, a company with “integrity.”
“I think what it comes down to is values. Our values align,” says Gatch, who also calls WallGoldfinger “one of the most creative, most inclusive places I’ve ever worked.”
For WallGoldfinger, which works daily with furniture dealers in New York City and across the country, Gatch’s experience, training and support of the company’s missions and values is extremely beneficial, notes company Chief Executive Officer John Wall.
“We feel fortunate that someone of Gerry’s experience has chosen to call Vermont home and WallGoldfinger his workplace,” says Wall. “Gerry will be a familiar face for many of our clients and has the know-how to help architects and clients alike achieve the best furniture design for their corporate space.”
To put Gatch and WallGoldfinger’s commitment to integrity and experience to work you, visit www.wallgoldfinger.com or call 802-483-4200.
