We ship to more than 80 countries. We have 16 foreign distributors. Right now our biggest foreign market is Mexico. In Europe, England and France have been strong markets. Interestingly, the Netherlands is a big market. We can’t figure out who exactly is buying our products there, but they are, in a big way.

In building your company in Greenwood, you not only founded a successful business, but you reinvigorated a dying town. Which was your primary goal?

It was to build the business. What we’ve been able to do in Greenwood just happened. It was my home, and I wasn’t going anywhere. One of my stockholders happened to have a historic building where I located my headquarters. It was on Cotton Row. I started buying the buildings next door, which had been abandoned and were falling in. That spread throughout all of downtown. I started getting real serious and said, "Hey, look what we can do with this town. If we do this on a greater scale, we can completely reinvent Greenwood." It has made a huge impact on the town. It has also been, for me, a wonderful architectural and preservation experiment.

I imagine it hasn’t hurt property values in downtown Greenwood, either.

It has raised property values significantly. That actually works against us, but that’s just the way it goes.

The high-end market is, to a certain extent, driven by the next big thing. Do you ever fear that your customer base will abandon you for the next "must-have" kitchen appliance?

That is interesting. When you study the history of the kitchen and of various cooking methods, it hasn’t changed that much since the early 1900s. Things are tweaked, advances are made—nothing earthshaking yet, other than the microwave. We will try to stay on top of any new innovative concepts. For instance, steam cooking is coming in, and we are developing a steam oven. The speed-cooking craze will probably be here for good, and we are looking at other materials and technologies. Hopefully, however, it will remain pretty much packaged in the same way. Maybe this is naïve, but we feel that the kitchen, or something very similar to what it is today, will remain for a very long time.