In March of 1979, Jim McAleer mortgaged his house to buy a bunch of desks.
That’s the short, very condensed version. The longer one starts on construction sites around Mobile in the late 1970s, where Jim kept hearing the same complaint: the building’s almost ready, but where are we supposed to get the furniture? There was no good local answer. So, one afternoon, he came home, sat down with his wife Camilla, and told her he wanted to be the answer.
McAleer’s Office Furniture was born. They had one full-time employee, a stack of catalogs, five kids (with another two yet to come) and a vision.
For years, the “corporate headquarters” was also the family kitchen. The McAleer children grew up doing homework in the back office and learning, mostly by osmosis, that a business is really a group of people who care and keep their promises. Jim delivered chairs out of the back of a van, starred in local TV ads and began to grow.
Fast-forward almost half a century, and the kid who used to spread her schoolwork across a showroom desk is now the one signing the paychecks.
Melissa comes home
Melissa Cross didn’t set out to run the family business. She left Mobile for the University of Alabama, went on to Pepperdine Law in Malibu, practiced in California, ran a showroom for a Dallas homebuilder, and eventually landed at an office furniture manufacturer in Iowa. Somewhere along the way, she realized she’d accidentally been training for the family business the whole time.
In 2012, she came home. A decade later, she bought the company from her dad. In 2025, she acquired Seating Source, a Texas import business and now sells her own line of executive and conference chairs nationwide, shipped straight into the Port of Mobile.
Ask her why she came back and you won’t get a speech. You’ll get something closer to: because I saw the opportunity to build something that continues my family’s legacy.
Melissa runs McAleer’s the way she runs most things – spreadsheet open, coffee in hand, and a very clear focus on leading people to do their best work and provide the best experience. Her brother David runs Pensacola. Her sister Sarah runs Foley. Three siblings, three cities, one last name over the door.
What actually happens when you walk in
People assume an office furniture store sells chairs and desks. McAleer’s does (of course!), in fact, the in-stock selection of new and used office furniture is the largest on the Gulf Coast. This matters when a client calls on a Thursday needing forty offices by Monday. But the quiet heart of the business is the design team.
A client walks in with a floor plan, a budget, and a look that says I have no idea where to start. A McAleer’s designer sits down and asks questions most stores never think to ask. Where does the afternoon light hit? Who has to sit near the printer? Is this the kind of team that will use a huddle room, or is it going to become a place people hide their lunches?
By the time the client leaves, they can see the space – walls, windows, finishes, fabrics, all before a single box is opened. And the designer they met on day one is the same designer there for them the morning the trucks arrive.
Small jobs, big jobs, everything between
The team takes projects “large to small,” and means it in both directions. A retired attorney’s home office gets the same designer as a hospital wing. Recent work includes Merchants & Marine Bank, Baldwin Preparatory Academy, Alabama School of Math and Science, Spring Hill College, Bryant Bank, University of South Alabama, and Outokumpu to name a few. Through contracts with GSA, the State of Alabama, the State of Florida, TIPS, Omnia, and HealthTrust, schools, cities, and hospitals get a local partner instead of a procurement headache.
What hasn’t changed at McAleer’s Office Furniture
Forty-seven years in, the projects are bigger, the software is fancier, and one showroom has become three. One thing hasn’t changed. Melissa still makes the connections. David still walks the floor. Sarah still puts together a client’s conference room herself.
Jim and Camilla bet the house on a hunch in 1979. Their daughter is still winning that bet; one office, one school, one hospital wing at a time.
McAleer’s Office Furniture • 3305 Spring Hill Ave. 476-8555 mcaleers.com
