DUBLIN, Georgia — We churn out a lot of cool things in central Georgia. Products like peaches, great music and even Kaolin.
But a lot of cities have businesses creating things you may not know about. Products that are going all over the country and even the world.
One of those cities is Dublin, Georgia where where Flexsteel makes furniture and you never know, you may have a Flexsteel product in your living room.
Marcia Dixon is the general manager."When someone rides by our plant and sees Flexsteel furniture they just assume because they see the word steel that we make some type of lawn furniture," she said. "They have no idea that we are an upholstery division."
Flexsteel actually makes a wide array of furniture products.
"Sofas, love seats, chairs, we make recliners both in fabric and leather we make the other furniture in leather also," Dixon rattled off.
It starts with the patterns mapped out on wood, which turn into huge frames waiting in line for all the stuffing and the material, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
"This is the inventory of all of the different types of leather that you see here," Marcia said pointing to stacks of leather.
They've got thousands of skins stacked up and brown is still the most popular color.
"And the Dublin plant cuts for all the Flexsteel divisions, so we're the supplying plant so everything that is built in leather is cut in Dublin, Georgia," Dixon said.
Dixon is a veteran in the field. "I've been here 34 years," she said.
That's just a little while after the plant opened in 1983.
"This was the old Uniroyal building they made Keds tennis shoes here," she recalled.
Nowadays, you can hear the hum of sewing machines. Dixon says these guys play an integral part in making a couch.
"There's basically not a lot of sewing operations left in this country," she said. "We sew a lot of heavy fabrics leather vinyl we do a lot of top stitching."
A couch or recliner makes it's final journey down the line where a slew of folks put on the finishing touches, that's where we found Jimmy Johnson.
"Basically after the back springer builds the frames and puts his part in, it goes to the seat man and then it comes to my job which is building the arms," he said.
Johnson says he thankful for the job, but it has made him a bit of a furniture "critic".
"I remember when I first started you go home and look at your furniture you be like 'this furniture ain't built right,'" he chuckled.