By Denise Perreault
PBN Staff Writer
Cheryl Merchant, president and CEO of Hope Global in Cumberland, has overcome many obstacles in her life.
Twenty-five years ago, when she was 20 years old, she was the only woman working second shift at General Motors Corp. in the gritty heart of Detroit.
In later years, she would work for Mazda, for Ford Motor Co. and, when the Ford plants were sold in the early 1990s, for Lear Corp. At every place, she was a supervisor, in charge of hundreds of employees.
She has been posted to Mexico and Canada. She’s supervised manufacturing plants in England, Poland and Germany. She helped Lear take $20 million off the cost of producing car interiors.
But the greatest challenge the 45-year-old Merchant ever faced came in Cumberland in October 2005.
Some 12.27 inches of water fell in the Blackstone Valley during the first two weeks of the month, with more than 4 inches falling on Oct. 15.
At Hope Global, located right next to the river, 5 feet of water surged through the low-lying factory, causing what was then estimated at $5 million in damages. The company was devastated.
At that time, Merchant had been in charge of Hope Global for five years. Born and raised in Michigan, she graduated in three-and-a-half years from Alma College, a small liberal-arts school in Alma, Mich. Her mother convinced her to attend a GM national hiring conference, and she became one of 12 hired out of 115 interviewed for the Cadillac plant in Detroit.
She spent two years at GM, then three years working as the only female supervisor at Mazda and then went to Ford, where she was sent to Mexico as quality director of the plant manufacturing seat covers for all 54 Ford factories.
In the early 1990s, Lear Corp. acquired her Ford division. She spent five years at Lear, working in Canada to oversee the manufacture of seat belts, and later as plant manager supervising the merger and consolidation of Lear facilities throughout Europe. One of Lear’s suppliers happened to be a relatively small manufacturing operation known as the Hope Webbing Co., founded in 1883.
In dealings with David Casty Hope’s president and CEO, Merchant was forthright, frank and candid – that’s her style – about how Hope could be improved. Impressed, Casty offered her a job in October 1999. “The plan was for me to run the company,” she says, and a year later, that’s exactly what she was doing.
Since Merchant took over, Hope Global has more than doubled in size, adding plants in Detroit, Brazil and Ireland to those already operating in France, Mexico and Rhode Island. The company has 800 employees worldwide, with 375 at the Cumberland site.
But all work on Martin Street came to a halt on that dismal day in October 2005 when, Merchant recalls, “this whole place was under water. Everything was gone.” When the water eventually receded, Hope Global was filled with a black, gooey mess several feet thick. It took three days of around-the-clock efforts to get a few machines running again.
Once the building was safe, employees wearing safety gloves, masks and boots helped to scrub the place clean, working 24/7 for many months. During that time, Merchant says proudly, “we never lost a customer, we never missed a shipment. The flood strengthened us internally and strengthened our reputation in the marketplace.” •
