BusinessTN

It is unlikely that Nashville hit songwriters Paul Overstreet and Jim Collins had entrepreneur Pam Lannom in mind when they wrote what became Kenny Chesney's smash country song "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy." But certainly Lannom, the Bradford, Tenn.-based aspiring dress designer-turned-replacement tractor seat cushion supplier, has an eye for putting the chic back in the tractor seat.

With her degrees in home economics and business, and her dreams of becoming a player in the fashion world, Bradford must have seemed to Lannom about as far away from the fashion capitals of Paris or New York City as one could get when she married Don Lannom, a native of the small Gibson County town. "But if you marry a Bradford boy, you live in Bradford,"Lannom says. (Don Lannom owns a local auto dealership and serves on the local school board.)

It was 1978 when Lannom started doing as the Romans do, buying locally based Rogers Cushion, which founders Dean and Gene Rogers had started a decade earlier in a Weakley County basement. "If you can design a dress then you can design a tractor seat that looks like the original," Lannom says. "The basics are the same. You want it to fit."

Nearly 30 years later, Lannom sells her handicraft to distributors who peddle it worldwide. She can replace just about any make or model of seat — and there are hundreds out there. "Massey-Ferguson, John Deere, International, David Brown, Oliver, Minneapolis Moline, Allis Chalmers, White," Lannom rattles off some brands. "There are a lot of funky names of tractors out there I'd never heard of until 30 years ago."

While it may not seem as glamorous as the runways of Milan, the business of seat cushion replacement brings with it a certain amount of job security — "People don't junk a tractor," Lannom points out.

Lannom describes the four employees of her operation as "obsessive-compulsive when it comes to perfection. Made in USA still carries some weight with my people." The company, she says, controls less than 1% of the worldwide tractor seat replacement market. "We're just a little speck." And her competition — mainly foreign — is stiff. Consider that Brentwood-based Tractor Supply Co. (TSC), the over $2 billion, 650-store, 33-state specialty niche retailer, imports about 75% of the replacement seats on its shelves from various foreign countries, according to TSC buyer Eric Jordan.

"But there are in this ag business a lot of niche vendors," Jordan continues. "We deal with many individual vendors who deal with very small numbers of skews like tractor decals or tractor manuals. There are not many complete category vendors out there."

Perhaps Lannom might consider reaching out to TSC to see if she has seats in her arsenal that the farm supply giant does not currently include on the 12-foot set designs in their stores. No doubt TSC is always open to relationships with new vendors, particularly ones that hail from Tennessee.