MERIDIAN FACTORY TOUR
his is the quietest factory T I’ve ever been in. OK, maybe you won’t hear a pin drop but you will hear a pencil hitting the floor. Nor is it big. I can walk around it in just a couple of minutes. And it certainly isn’t busy. People here do not rush to keep up with an unthinking assembly line; they can interrupt what they’re doing to talk to me, and leave one job to demonstrate what happens with another. There are only 20 employees in the factory and according to Meridian’s CEO and major shareholder, John Buchanan, they’re all multi-skilled.
NO PICTURES PLEASE!
We enter the factory midway along its length I am asked not take pictures of staff members, so I point my camera to the left because over that half of the factory I cannot see a single soul. Buchanan likes it this way. ‘We have twice as many workstations as staff members,’ he says. ‘If one workstation can’t provide enough work for someone, then that person simply moves to another workstation and gets on with something else.’
With an output of only 2,000 to 2,500 loudspeakers a year Meridian is an unashamedly boutique operation. Economies of scale don’t
