The Happiest Basketcase in Niceville
By Breanne Boland May 6, 2004 Issue

Heather Porterfield’s house is a shrine to her part-time job. There are baskets on shelves, holding bread, mail, and remote controls, and lining the top of her office, whose desk is covered with woven organizers. There are Longaberger wrought iron pie pan holders supporting Longaberger pottery pie pans. Baskets and other Longaberger products are on almost every table, shelf, and any other flat surface that can be found. They’re also hanging on the walls, including a tiny message basket by the phone, just big enough for a slip of paper from a notepad. On her dining room floor are unopened boxes, with a return address from The Longaberger Company. How many baskets does Porterfield have? “Over 200,” she answers with a certainty that doesn’t match her imprecise number. Why such a firm but vague answer? “I stopped counting at 200. That was last year.”

To anyone unfamiliar with the Longaberger empire, this basket-filled house might seem an anomaly. However, to anyone who has attended a home show or who knows someone who sells, this is just business as usual. Longaberger does not have customers so much as it has converts.

The company keeps interest high by straddling practicality and collectability. Baskets have always had a place in American homes, for laundry and the kitchen and general storage. Longaberger enthusiasts use their baskets for all of these purposes. However, it’s the extra dimension, the special holiday edition baskets, the brass plates marked with the year, the signatures by the artisans, that keep Longaberger fans coming back to the parties and in constant communication with their representative. Even after every odd and end in the house is tucked in a basket, Longaberger fans keep buying. They’re a good investment, after all. And well made – the baskets will likely outlive the buyer.

Porterfield bought her first Longaberger basket in 1992. “I fell in love with the product,” she says. “The quality is better than any other basket out there. I thought about joining the company for years,” she says. “After having my third child, I wanted something to get me out of the house, so I could interact with grownups.”

Longaberger consultants come to the company in two ways. For Porterfield, it was gradual. She collected the baskets for eight years before she grew tired of giving her commission to someone else. “It finally dawned on me that I could get getting that myself,” she says. “Now I’m my own best customer. I have been from the start, and will be until I stop.” Others realize quickly what they want to do. “One woman came to her first home show about a week ago. Afterwards, she walked up to me and said, ‘I want to do this.’ They look at the product and say, ‘This is for me.’” Shannon Lucas signed her Longaberger contract the day of this interview, becoming Porterfield’s second associate.

There are a few other Longaberger ladies in the area, enough that they’ve formed their own support group that they call “The Orphan Branch,” because they all signed onto the company under someone who doesn’t live here. They meet once a month and discuss things they’ve learned from their various far-flung advisors and from their own experience. “There’s no territory, no boundaries,” Porterfield says. “We all come up with new ideas and share, and it gets sent out via email and trickles out through the consultants. It’s not competitive.”

Which is not the only thing that makes the company unique. Longaberger is still family owned and private, and belief in the products seems to keep everyone involved with it buoyant and entirely confident in the mission. The 70,000 Longaberger consultants across the United States are invited to the company’s headquarters in Dresden, Ohio once a year for a Bee, where representatives from across the country can mingle and exchange tips, and meet the people who work in Longaberger’s main office, a seven-story tall version of the company’s Medium Market Basket – complete with handles.

Porterfield clearly feels close to the company. “At the Bee, you can write a note to the president, and she reads them all and responds,” she says. “At the last one, I wrote that I couldn’t go to the one that’s happening this summer, because Ainsley’s starting kindergarten. I told her I wanted to walk my daughter into her first day of school. The president wrote back and wished my daughter and I good luck.” Other occasions warrant direct communication from the Longabergers. “When you hold a home show and sell more than $1500 worth of product, a family member writes a personalized note,” she says. “It’s more than just a ‘no-name’ kind of business. They watch what we’re doing, and give us credit where credit is due.”

Porterfield earns a lot of her own credit. In her house, only the hallway and the garage are without baskets. Other than that, Porterfield says that there is at least one, if not more (many more) in every room. Her daughters, the next generation of Longaberger fans, use them extensively. Shelby, who at 12 is the oldest, uses them to hold her CDs. Nine-year-old Kristen fills baskets with video games. Ainsley stuffs them with Barbies and books. And Porterfield herself uses them to hold magazines, catalogs, mail, phone messages, and just about everything else. In her dining room, a large basket opens up to reveal… more baskets.

However, despite the widespread devotion, Longaberger baskets aren’t priced for easy consumption. A basket the size of a small trashcan is $79, and many cost more than that. Porterfield defends the prices vehemently, saying, “The quality of our baskets is above and beyond the quality of any other basket you will find. They use no staples or glue, and they’re all handmade by an artisan well trained in the art of basket making. You’re not just buying a basket, you’re buying a piece of art that’s fully functional and meant to be used every day in your house.”

It may be the domestic side of Longaberger that appeals to her most of all. “The first basket I bought in 1992, I bought for my oldest daughter with the intention of giving it to her when she gets married. It still looks just like it did when I bought it. They’re handmade to be handed down. Having a family has made me realize that I wanted to be involved in something I could be proud of, and that my children could be proud of when they watched me.”

Longaberger inspires something other than pride sometimes. When Ainsley gets in trouble, Porterfield threatens to call Longaberger. “For some reason, that’s scarier than anything else,” she laughs.

To learn more about Longaberger and Heather Porterfield, go to www.longaberger.com/heatherporterfield.

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