Ethan Allen has always been “all in the family” for Roxanne Wright.
But although “everyone” in her family worked for the company, including her parents and grandparents, the pleasant Ethan Allen veteran—a production scheduler who also oversees inventory control in our Orleans, Vermont, manufacturing plant—never planned to stay.
“I grew up less than ten miles away from the [former] Beecher Falls plant,” remembers Roxanne, who will be 60 this month. “I was valedictorian of my high school class and planned to attend college.” She took a job in the finishing room to save money for school but found she liked the work—and that was 42 years ago!
As someone who “always loved bookwork and math,” Roxanne passed an aptitude test and was promoted to shopping clerk; soon it was on to scheduling, then inventory control. “I wore a lot of hats and always loved what I did,” she says.
In 2009, when the Beecher Falls, Vermont, plant closed and operations moved to Orleans some 60 miles away, Roxanne was asked to stay on. “I’ll never forget it. The factory closed on Friday, and I was back to work on Monday,” she remembers.
Her dedication and hard work have paid off. Today, her supervisor says she plays an integral role in keeping the entire Orleans operation on schedule—from monitoring stock to tracking production in order to meet promise dates for custom orders.
“Roxanne has great leadership skills and is well-respected throughout the company,” says Mike Worth, Ethan Allen’s Northeast Regional Operations Manager.
“I’m not all that,” she insists. “I just have a passion for what I do. When you care about your work, you don’t feel like you’re any better than anyone. You just do the job.”
Roxanne enjoys reading (“I’ve had my nose in a book since the day I learned how to read,” she says.), hiking, bird watching, baking, and traveling with her husband Steve, an Ethan Allen alum who is now retired. They have two grown daughters, who live in New Hampshire, and two grandchildren. She says she is “completely devoted” to her family.
The secret to Roxanne’s professional success has been to keep learning—from training on a new computer system some years back, to getting along with coworkers, and to “getting people to take on tasks they don’t necessarily want to do,” she says, with a laugh.
She describes her most important life lesson as “learning how to be truly happy—with my personal life and my work life. I try to balance both,” she says. “At the end of the day, I try to keep myself as happy as I can be.”
