Kimball International consists of furniture brands: Kimball, National, Interwoven, Etc., Poppin, D'Style and Kimball Hospitality. It is the successor to W.W. Kimball and Company, the world's largest piano and organ manufacturer at certain times in the 19th and 20th centuries.
On March 8, 2023, HNI Corporation entered into an agreement to purchase Kimball International. On June 1, 2023, the acquisition was completed.
History
Kimball Piano and Organ
This division started as a piano dealership in Chicago in 1857 as W.W. Kimball and Company by William Wallace Kimball (1828–1904). In 1864, Kimball moved from its earliest location in the corner of a jewelry store to sales rooms in the Crosby Opera House where Kimball sold pianos made by East Coast piano makers Chickering and Sons, the J & C Fischer Piano Company, Hallet & Davis, F.C. Lighte, Joseph P. Hale, and the W.P. Emerson Piano Company. Kimball also sold less expensive reed organs. The Great Chicago Fire destroyed all of Kimball's commercial assets in 1871, but he continued selling from his home, and rebuilt his dealership business.
In 1877, W.W. Kimball began assembling its own reed organs, using actions made by the J.G. Earhuff Company and cases made by contractors. After three years, the company began offering organs made entirely in house. In 1882, the Kimball company was incorporated, and an expansive factory was built to produce reed organs. Soon, the factory was producing 15,000 organs a year; the world's largest organ maker. Kimball stopped making reed organs in 1922 after having produced 403,390 instruments.
In 1887, Kimball began building a five-story factory for making its own pianos, and the next year produced 500 instruments of unremarkable quality. Kimball hired veterans from Steinway & Sons and C. Bechstein Pianofortefabrik, and these men initiated improvements to the piano line. By 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition, at which Kimball received the "Worlds Columbian Exposition Award", Kimball was known for high quality, efficiency in manufacture, and aggressive sales practices using 35–40 traveling salesmen to cover cities and remote areas. Prominent East Coast piano makers snubbed the Chicago exposition because they feared Chicago favoritism, and because of philosophical differences between their reliance on traditional name brand faithfulness and Kimball's streamlined modern efficiency which greatly threatened their sales.In 1890, Kimball hired Englishman Frederic W. Hedgeland, trained at his family's organworks in London: W.M. Hedgeland. Hedgeland supervised a portable pipe organ design about the size of a large upright piano. The pipe organ division of Kimball also built large, permanent pipe organs, including one for the Mormon Tabernacle in 1901. When the pipe organ division was closed down in 1942, some 7,326 models had been built.
Kimball was involved in making player pianos, the first effort being an automatic mechanism in 1901. As well, from 1915 to 1925, Kimball produced a popular line of phonographs.
During World War II, Kimball produced aircraft parts for major military airplane manufacturers such as Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed. After the war, piano production resumed but a series of poor financial decisions by W.W. Kimball Jr led the company into decline. In the mid-1950s, Kimball built a luxurious new factory in the Chicago suburb of Melrose Park, Illinois, but the factory's high costs, its poor performance, and flagging sales brought the company into grave financial crisis. Kimball had slipped from being the world's largest piano maker to the seventh largest, and it was nearly insolvent.
In 1959, the W.W. Kimball Company was purchased from the last remaining Kimball family heir by Mr. Arnold F. Habig, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of The Jasper Corporation which began operations in 1950 and founded by Mr. Arnold F. Habig. The combined company was later renamed Kimball International.
Piano production was relocated to the small, southern Indiana town of West Baden, Indiana, where the company was rejuvenated and once again began to grow. Ten years after the purchase, Kimball was once again the world's largest piano company.