Georgia Magazine - November 2010 - (Page 25)

COURTESY OF KELLWOOD MANUFACTURING Making it pay in Kellwood Manufacturing can revive the memories of rural life, as in this re-created country store. Georgia Sheldon, and CEO Gerald Keller. “But that’s not what these customers are looking for when they come to Kellwood to obtain more of an heirloom piece,” he says. The firm has built old-fashioned corner cupboards, beds, anything that can be custom-made out of wood. “People bring in pictures,” he says, “and we build it.” “But most of what we do is portable buildings,” says Keller. A replica country store, for instance, even had grocery items on the shelves inside. Another client bought an antique gas pump and wanted Kellwood to build an island for it. They did. Gazebos are made in Georgia under the Kellwood brand by another of the five families, and Kellwood also builds the lawn furniture in Georgia. (478) 982-5225; www.kellwoodmac.com. Atlanta area. Nick Hyde, vice president, is a journalism graduate from Georgia State University, while Andrew Wade is a graduate of the Terry School of Business at the University of Georgia. (404) 745-9457; www.smushion.com. Clamming up Some of the sweetest clams are raised on Georgia’s coast by Charlie Phillips, founder, with Rodger DeWitt, of Sapelo Sea Farms. Phillips has since bought out DeWitt’s interest and now heads the company alone. “We started on Sapelo in 1996,” says Phillips, “when we got our first clams from the University of Georgia Marine Extension to help launch a project to see if we could actually do clam aquaculture here.” A few tastes of these small, sweet beauties assured him that they could. But Phillips’ methods have changed since the launch. He plants his clam beds on mud and not on sand as they originally did. “We went to the Cedar Keys (in the Gulf of Mexico, Fla.) and to South Carolina and looked at what they were doing, and mixed a little of that with what we were doing, and now we’re growing everything in bags so we don’t have to hand-harvest anything,” says Phillips. “We pull the bags up, wash the clams off and grade them.” The take? 15,000 clams in an hour and a half, “dock to dock,” he says. Most are sold to distributors such as Mathews Seafood in Savannah. A lot of his clams, he says, go to Canada in 20-count bags that head straight to grocery stores. Private customers can order directly from the company and have them shipped. Phillips does not rest on clams alone. As Phillips Seafood, he packs and sells shrimp and fish, and soon may have an oyster operation going. (912) 832-4423. ‘Smushion’ your environment By the time you get through using a memoryfoam, multi-use crescent-shaped cushion, you may want a wardrobe of them in different colors for different purposes. The Smushion is a lightweight, clean-line cushion that can be used as lumbar support while you work in front of the computer or drive long distances, or as a knee or footrest, or as a spot for your laptop while you’re using it, say, in front of the TV or in a hotel room. Made in Atlanta by Relaxation Designs, the Smushion came about Relaxation when one of its founders, Designs in Eric Elan, known as a Atlanta created the “Smushion” to make napping champion napper, couldn’t find a comfortable spot in and using a laptop computer which to recover from an more comfortable. exhausting session watching a football game. Upon awakening, he contacted his sister Sara, and the pair began to design this comfort-providing memory-foam cushion. They staple-gunned the first one, and although that methodology has gone by the wayside, the basics of the original design are there. Elan, a Georgia Tech graduate in mechanical engineering, joined alums from two of the state’s other major universities, to produce the Smushion in the November 2010 KRISTEN WA DE conte mporary Southern taste In good spirits When, in 2007, four friends—Alton Darby, Kent Cost, Dr. Gil Klemann and Winford Hines—from Americus, began to talk about distilling spirits, they had in mind a homemade vodka for family and friends. Little could they have suspected their casual conversation and initial friends-and-family vodka would have led to founding a distillery. Made in small batches, the handcrafted spirits of Thirteenth Colony take advantage of the distillery’s location atop one of the South’s oldest and deepest aquifers. Thus, the water is of a singular purity, perfect for making fine-quality distilled spirits. Locally grown 25 More online at www.georgiamagazine.org http://www.smushion.com http://www.kellwoodmac.com http://www.georgiamagazine.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Georgia Magazine - November 2010

Georgia Magazine - November 2010
Contents
Viewpoint
Mailbox
Picture This?
Georgia News
Calendar
Currents
A Tour of Honor
Making it Pay in Georgia
Around Georgia
My Georgia
Georgia Cooks
Snapshot

Georgia Magazine - November 2010