The Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association is standing firm on its antidumping and countervailing fight with the board literally standing shoulder to shoulder on a dais at the group’s annual spring meeting in support of these efforts.

“We're going to continue to fight for our fair trade agenda,” said Jeff Gulledge, president of Montgomery, Alabama-based Bishop Cabinets and the incoming chairman of the association board. “We've seen the real dollars, $4.9 billion, by seeing this enforced properly. And we're going to continue to stay the course.”

The fight, Gulledge and other members of the board and association staff said, is not with cabinets and components coming from Vietnam and other countries through legal channels. “We're fighting stuff that's going from China to Vietnam to here.”

To continue the legal challenges, the association board is looking to fund the effort by raising some $3 million from its members over the next several months. 

The group reiterated its commitment at the first meeting since the issue caused a falling out among its ranks. At the KCMA’s fall conference in Sioux Falls, S.D., last October, the tariffs issue caused three of the largest cabinet companies in the U.S. to leave the association. 

While the three companies, -- Cabinetworks Group, MasterBrand Cabinets, and American Woodmark – said they support the U.S. Department of Commerce’s imposition of anti-dumping and countervailing duties on certain Chinese cabinet and vanity imports in our industry, they felt that their supply chains were compliant with the Commerce department’s new rules and the “existing Commerce orders address China’s unfair trade practices in a clear and consistent way, avoiding rigidity and the unintentional penalization of good faith importers and suppliers.”

While the three company’s departure was still on the minds of the board and its members, the association felt that its membership was more united than ever. Betsy Natz, KCMA CEO said that the group gained 52 new members since the fall meeting.

In addition to its international trade activities, the KCMA plans to increase the awareness of its certification programs and to grow the association's brand through marketing efforts.

The Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association 67th Annual Spring Leadership Conference was held April 25-27 at the Henderson Beach Resort in Destin, Florida.