Vent-A-Hood: How the Kitchen Icon Became a Business Stalwart

Tucked away in a nondescript, 150,000-square-foot flex facility in Richardson at the corner of Arapaho Road and Greenville Avenue is a company whose brand is nearly synonymous with the product. Its name and stylish logo evoke images of the Good Housekeeping era of the 1950s, when every housewife in pearls waited for hubby to come home, ready with a pitcher of martinis in the icebox and a steak cooking on the range beneath a Vent-A-Hood.

SILENCE IS GOLDEN: Vent-A-Hood’s trademarked Magic Lung blower removes grease and smoke quieter than any competitor product. Magic Lung: courtesy of Vent-A-Hood

Yes, that Vent-A-Hood. Aside from its bon mot name, the reason Vent-A-Hood is near eponymous is that it was, in fact, the first manufacturer of home-cooking ventilation and range hoods, starting in 1933. Those early model range hoods were manufactured in a house with a dirt floor in Dallas and then sold door to door. Carr P. Collins, a Dallas financier and founder of Fidelity Union Life Insurance Co., financed this family-owned company. Miles Woodall, Jr., nephew of Collins, was recruited in 1938 to manage the company. Today, his son, Miles “Skip” Woodall III, is CEO of the company.

Production has come a long way since dirt floors, but the image and brand of Vent-A-Hood have barely budged. The company’s products are manufactured today in the Richardson facility the company moved to in 1961, when the nearby suburb still seemed remote. And truth be told, the design is not much changed from the original 1937 product. Oh, there have been tweaks and upgrades over the decades to the machinery. But at the heart of the Vent-A-Hood product is the trademarked Magic Lung blower system that removes 99 percent of grease and smoke more quietly than any competitor, using a centrifuge system rather than filters to liquefy airborne grease.

Vent-A-Hood as a product is self-explanatory; Vent-A-Hood as a business is a bit of an enigma—not anachronistic, but certainly not in step with typical modern business trends. It’s as traditional a manufacturing business as one could find, and yet it hasn’t followed the lead of most American manufacturers. With the exception of the motors, the entire product is created, crafted, finished, and shipped out right there in the Richardson facility, not more than about 300 paces from the CEO’s office. The only “outsourcing” to be found might be the titanic, German-made metal die cutters and other heavy equipment, all manned and maintained by local employees on a first-name basis with Skip Woodall. (“We like to think of this as the Southwest Airlines of manufacturing—we almost have no turnover. I wouldn’t want to work in a place I wouldn’t want to work,” Woodall confides with a wry smile. Some of the employees are the fourth generation of their own family to work at Vent-A-Hood.)

While most other American and European kitchen-appliance manufacturers have evolved over time to offer a suite of appliances under the same label, under Woodall’s leadership Vent-A-Hood has consciously pared down their product line to focus solely on kitchen ventilation and range hoods, and now to focus only on residential kitchens. (You can see the company’s past contribution to Dallas commercial kitchens at restaurants like Javier’s on Cole Avenue, or the first very first Chili’s, which opened in March 1975 at Greenville Avenue and Walnut Hill Road.) While much of the process is automated, the company employs a contingent of skilled artisans who craft custom orders by hand. Woodall—a fifth-generation Texan whose family came from Tennessee to snap up land grants offered by Sam Houston—has actually centralized ownership of the company rather than expand it, by buying back shares from extended family members. He plans for the company to go forward as a close family business well after he’s gone. 

So how in Hades’ kitchen does a company that by all rights should be a dinosaur remain so active and dominant in the market? Woodall says it comes down to three main focuses: “Educating customers. Adapting to the marketplace. Focusing on what we do best.” The former Marine reservist seems to be in constant sales mode and his enthusiasm is genuine. Dressed in his usual uniform—a Vent-A-Hood golf shirt and a sport jacket with a gold Vent-A-Hood lapel pin—Woodall is reviewing pages for the new catalog designed by his brother Blake, who’s been the firm’s marketing director for seven years now.

The company has been part of Skip Woodall’s life since he was a kid working part-time on the assembly line, screwing little light bulbs into hood systems for 25 cents an hour. He joined full-time in 1968, starting on the assembly line and working his way up to plant foreman, and then plant manager. He was made president in 1986, when the company was still spreading its attention among a number of products and vertical markets.

“In the 1960s and 1970s, we were still manufacturing a lot of items not even related to kitchens or Vent-A-Hoods. We even manufactured steel beds for the military and for college dorms,” Woodall says.

Woodall reasoned that too much of the business was dependent on factors well outside his control such as housing sales, new home starts, and design trends. He’d seen other luxury category appliance name brands come into and fall out of favor based not so much on performance and design, but on the fickle taste of high-end kitchen industry buyers and design magazine editors. He’d seen direct and down-market competitors come and go since the heyday of the 1950s and early 1960s. His own company had ruled the luxury roost in those days, but the advent of downdraft ventilation systems in the 1960s and 1970s nearly decimated the market for overhead ventilation. He remembers attending appliance trade shows in that period where his company was the only overhead manufacturer present.

So to control what he could, he set the company’s course to focus on the one thing he knew it could do better than others—the overhead hoods, and for residential customers only. And more, without sacrificing the luxury market position, he wanted to increase volume by increasing the amount of manufactured versus custom hoods the company crafted. In the 1960s, it was 80 percent custom, 20 percent manufactured. Today, it’s exactly the opposite, with 80 percent of sales from the “in stock” range hoods. The company, by its own measures, has about 70 percent of the high-end ventilation market, sold through home centers and direct distributors, all of whom undergo regular training at the Richardson headquarters. The product line begins and ends with island hoods, under-cabinet hoods, wall-mount hoods, liner inserts, and custom hoods.

“You can’t be everything to everyone and be any good,” Woodall says. “And that’s why we focus on this one thing.”

That’s not to say the company doesn’t seek market expansion and new venues. Woodall is as much a tinkerer as a salesman—he jokes he’s a frustrated engineer—and he’s got several design patents under his belt. By paying attention to market trends, he’s been able to adapt his product line so as not to cede any opportunities.

For instance, he knows that with his own cheapest model hood retailing for around $400, there’s no competing with the low-end, $30 models installed in most builder-grade tract homes. Some 15,000 of these louder, filter-based ventilators are sold every day. That’s a lot of blowers. The industry-standard size for these hood systems is six inches, whereas the Vent-A-Hood unit is nine inches, owing to the centrifuge and motor system. So not only are they at opposite ends of the price spectrum, they’re physically incompatible, right? Woodall didn’t see it that way. He saw that kitchen remodeling was one of the fastest-growing segments for home-improvement retailers like Lowe’s and Home Depot. Luxury-product sales for appliances like Viking ranges were on the rise. Plus, kitchens are increasingly the focal point of home life. He may not be able to tap the builder’s grade market, he figured, but he could get them on the back end.

So, with an engineering-student intern helping him, he went to work on figuring out how to shrink his blower. Eventually, they came up with a way to fit the motor and centrifuge into a Vent-A-Hood comparable in size to the standard, builder-grade hood. Now, priced as it is, it’s not going to be the choice of the first-time homebuyer, but it may be for that remodeling homebuyer in five years.

Of course, the company has jumped on the green bandwagon, positioning itself as the healthiest ventilation system on the market. Blake Woodall says that Vent-A-Hood’s green features are growing in popularity with consumers—especially since green-conscious buyers generally trend toward higher incomes.

“People want a healthy, beautiful home.  They want to save energy.  They want clean air without the grease, odors, and hazardous gases that come from indoor cooking.  And they want a quiet range hood that meets all those requirements,” Blake says. That’s not just sales talk for green buyers—independent studies show the Vent-A-Hood system does indeed use less energy than competitors.

RETRO CHIC: Skip Woodall (left) has kept his company thriving by offering classic quality matched with cutting-edge styles, like this range (above), one of the Vent-A-Hood’s best-sellers.

The company is also on the cutting edge of design, focusing on setting the trends instead of just following them. While the custom side of the company can craft any style hood a customer wants, the manufactured hood line is at the forefront of designer tastes. The top names in luxury cook-tops line up to partner their product with Vent-A-Hood. Early next year, the company is launching a line of retro hoods—remakes of their earliest hood designs incorporating the latest technology.

“There’s a movement toward retro in kitchen design, and since we were the first, you can’t get more retro than that,” Skip Woodall says, showing a visitor a wall of ads and marketing materials dating back to the 1940s. It’s like a pop-culture touchstone—ads featuring icons like Rock Hudson and Fred McMurray lounging in their kitchens beneath that smoke-removing iconic hood and futurama-like catalog illustrations of the “kitchen of tomorrow” as seen from the 1950s.

 At the end of a plant tour, Woodall talks about how he wants to keep the company in the family for generations to come. It’s kept him and his four brothers together all these years, even if working with family can be a strain. Woodall has three children of his own—the oldest son is a U.S. Marine like his old man, currently serving in intelligence. His daughter is a teacher. His youngest son has a passion for the business like his father did—working at the plant any time he’s not in college studying business. 

Somehow, at the end of the day, Woodall makes this anomaly work—this big business run like a family store, this old-fashioned product manufactured and marketed with high-tech ideas and a youthful adaptability, this odd marriage of engineering, utility, and art. While the company steadfastly refuses to release sales figures, they do boast that June 2007 was the best month in the company’s seven decades, despite the softening of the housing market. They are dominant in the upper-end market, whatever the numbers.

“We’ve seen a tremendous surge for product as the construction and remodeling season heats up,” says Blake Woodall, who also serves as director of sales.

Still, though this singular-focus business model works, Skip Woodall is well aware of the old saw about putting all eggs in one basket. What if something—whatever it could be—could come along and make his entire product obsolete? Woodall—though he loves the product and the prestige his family’s company has earned for itself—doesn’t blink.

“This is a fully functioning manufacturing facility. We own every piece of technology and equipment in here. We have even more in human capital—our engineers can run and repair those big machines better than the people who built them. Every bit of steel we don’t use we recycle. We could be manufacturing a new product within days if we needed to,” he says. “But we don’t need to.”