Kaidi ramps up Grand Haven manufacturing plant

Office furniture supplier Kaidi LLC originally planned to build a new facility in Holland to produce components for height-adjustable office desks. 

Then the pandemic hit five years ago and “everything got put on hold,” said Dave Olson, operations manager at Kaidi, which now plans to begin producing components at a former plastics molding plant in Grand Haven. 

Once the pandemic passed, the company a year and half ago started looking for options to set up production and decided to proceed with construction of a 220,000-square-foot production facility in Holland’s northside industrial park. 

That plan changed, too, when the former Grand Haven-based West Michigan Molding Inc. went out of business in 2023. Kaidi saw a listing for the 186,000-square-foot production facility on the south side of Grand Haven and subsequently dropped plans to build in Holland. 

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High construction and material costs, long lead times to acquire needed electrical transformers, and construction scheduling challenges also contributed to the decision to buy the Grand Haven facility, Olson said. 

A subsidiary of a Chinese manufacturer Kaidi International, the company has been using the facility for a year for warehousing and now plans to launch production in the second half of 2025. 

“We’ve been operating here for the last year, strictly as a warehouse, so we get imported products from Vietnam and from our headquarters in China and sell out of here. Now, with especially with this tariff push and everything, that has accelerated the process of production here,” Olson said.  

The former West Michigan Molding facility provides exactly what Kaidi needs for establishing its North American production, especially the electrical capacity and other infrastructure, plus it’s in a location that’s a good draw for workers. 

“It’s perfect for our operations that we want to do,” Olson said. “West Michigan, obviously, is the office furniture capital and everybody’s here, and so that works perfect, and then just the facility alone. In Grand Haven, we have a workforce that we can pull in from Muskegon, from Holland, and from all over the area.” 

The 3.5-acre site also has room for future expansion, Olson said. 

The company expects to begin production with 60 employees and eventually employ between 100 and 150 people in Grand Haven, where it will produce electrical actuators and mechanisms and metal components for height-adjustable office desks that office furniture OEMs can finish with their own desktops. 

Kaidi opened the Holland warehouse in 2019 and, at the urging of clients, has been wanting to establish production in the U.S. to have supply chains closer to home in case of another disruption similar to what occurred during the pandemic. 

“We talked to a lot of our customers right after the pandemic and a lot of them, some of our bigger prospects, expressed an interest or a want to have domestic manufacturing capability. Basically, we are listening to them, and this is why we wanted to push this and get things done running here,” said Mark DeKraker, regional sales and account manager for Kaidi. “They want some sort of insurance policy if there’s a COVID 2 or something like that. A lot of these big companies felt pain and disruption in the supply chains, and they got caught. Now they figure they’ll have an insurance policy if they have production domestically in their backyard if something like that happens again.” 

Setting up production in the U.S. would also enable to company to qualify to sell product to the federal government through the General Services Administration, DeKraker said. 

A recent report from Grand View Research Inc. estimated that the U.S. office furniture industry in 2024 was $16.4 billion and projected to grow to at a 5% annual compound growth rate through 2030. 

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