Paragon at 50: Lendell Glassco on family leadership, adaptation and longevity l Portrait

Fifty years is quite the milestone … and it’s one Paragon celebrated at April’s High Point Market. This family-owned, domestic wall art company is currently led by co-presidents (and brothers) Lendell and Vince Glassco, sons of the founders of the company. Also in the executive mix is sister Malanta Glassco Knowles, VP of marketing and design.

We caught up with Lendell Glassco, where he shared the impact of reaching this milestone as well as what has kept the company and family thriving.

Tell us a bit about the Paragon family of home décor products

Paragon offers a wide range of wall décor product types including framed art, canvases, mirrors, wall sculptures and framed objects with design-oriented touches and is 65% of the collection. Propac is smaller scale with more standardized-size framed art and canvas product that is value-priced and makes up about 25% of the collection. The Studio products include in-house, hand-painted images or enhanced prints and uses specialized materials and techniques to create unique, highly styled pieces of art and lamps that make up 10% of the collection.

In July 2023, we merged Paragon and Propac Images, which until then had operated as two separate companies (sharing market showrooms) primarily for family estate planning purposes. In 2010, Paragon purchased wall décor manufacturer Kinder-Harris (now called The Studio) to extend the high end of our product scope. Today, we operate as one company with three product groups and price points. With the merger, customers can now purchase product from any of the groups on a single order and receive one shipment with an improved freight rate.

How did Paragon get its start?

In the 1970s, Wendell Glassco (my father) was an executive at a mobile home manufacturing company. His wife Bonnie (my mother) and a couple of the other executives’ wives started a small business to style the interiors of mobile home models for dealer shows.

In 1975, the business was incorporated as Paragon Decors, Inc. to offer a broader customer base of manufacturers and dealers with home accessory décor kits. Wendell joined Bonnie a couple of years later to expand the business nationwide. Framed art was a key component of these kits, and the company was unable to find a reliable source of affordable artwork in the colors or subject matter needed, so they researched and started making their own line of pictures.

In 1981, the decision was made to add a distribution channel, and a framed art line branded Paragon Picture Gallery was developed for the gift and furniture markets. The second generation of the family, Lendell Glassco, Malanta Glassco Knowles and Vince Glassco joined Paragon over the next few years and both divisions ran concurrently through 1989, when the decision was made for the future to focus efforts on being a leader in the wall décor industry.

Share some of the highlights of your tenure at Paragon

I began working full-time with Paragon when framed art operations were starting, so I have witnessed all the many highs and the few lows the company has experienced. Statistics show that only 12% of family-owned companies survive into the third generation, and I am proud that we have made it to that milestone. [Jordan Glassco Smith, sales and design; and Colby Glassco, operations; are the children of Lendell and Vince, respectively.]

You and your brother are co-presidents. How do you divide up responsibilities?

We are not big on titles and as owners we all do a little bit of everything. Vince and I served as president of Paragon and Propac, respectively, before the merge so we just came up with co-president for now. We two, along with our sister Malanta, who worked for both companies through the years in design, sales and marketing roles, work together as owners on strategic things. We have begun to include my daughter Jordan Glassco Smith and Vince’s son Colby Glassco into those meetings to build experience in the third generation. We are fortunate to have some other long-term, non-family executives who play key roles in our organization as well.

What are some of the benefits (and challenges) of working with your siblings?

The three of us have different personalities and skill sets that we bring to work each day, and we get along well. Utilizing the strength of that collective thinking provides for better strategic decision-making and shared support and responsibility for the initiatives we strive to implement.

 How do you choose art and artists, and how do you determine what will resonate with your customers?

Malanta leads our design team, and we source imagery from artists and art publishers across the globe. Our team’s years of experience guides our intuition for selecting subject matter for all regions of the country, and on-trend color is also a key. One of the big changes in the last decade is almost all imagery now is print-on-demand using large-format printers. Paragon has invested in these machines, and we are now able to have royalty agreements and produce a lot of the prints and canvases we use in house.

The consumer shopping landscape has changed over 50 years. What are measures you’ve taken at Paragon to keep business strong?

We are acutely aware the consumer now has a variety of options to shop — walk in a store, hire a designer, search online, social media or a combination. It’s a challenge as a domestic manufacturer to support all the subsets of retailers with differing business models regarding product ordering, stocking policies, packaging and shipping requirements, and access to product data.

We take the divide-and-conquer approach to stratify customers, and train and assign account managers and sales reps to support specific retailer types. We also invest heavily in our printed sales materials, website, app, data/image feeds and other product knowledge tools to meet our customer needs.

What inspires you to continue to grow in this business/field? 

Those that don’t continually learn new things and adapt to today’s dizzying pace of technology-oriented changes are doomed to become obsolete. In college, I took computer coding classes and Paragon purchased one of the first IBM PCs made. One of my first work projects was to move our accounting from paper ledgers to the computer, and I have tried to keep up with technology and software that could benefit our business ever since. Today, AI seems to be the next big thing to learn about to be a successful business leader.

What are your plans for Paragon’s next 50 years?

It will be a fabulous legacy if the company celebrates its 100-year anniversary. Our belief is that achievement has the best chance to happen by being engaged in the challenges and opportunities of the present and doing forward-looking things every step of the way.