Innovation lifeblood of manufacturing

COURTESY COOLEY GROUP
GETTING THE MESSAGE: Cooley’s 6,000-square-foot billboard in New York City’s Times Square. The billboard uses thin solar panels, reducing costs and emissions.
COURTESY COOLEY GROUP GETTING THE MESSAGE: Cooley’s 6,000-square-foot billboard in New York City’s Times Square. The billboard uses thin solar panels, reducing costs and emissions.

Popular history holds the 20th-century decline of the textile industry responsible for many of the economic ills plaguing Rhode Island and Massachusetts’ SouthCoast.
What it doesn’t account for is the continuing, and growing, contribution companies born from textiles are now making to a diversified and innovation-based manufacturing economy in the region.
One of those old textile companies is Pawtucket’s Cooley Group, which first opened its doors in 1926 to make cotton cloth awnings for shops and storefronts.
From its earliest years, Cooley has been focused on innovating, first in awnings and then into engineered membranes and markets where the company’s technical experience provided an advantage in products such as billboards, reservoir covers, chemical tanks, roofing and oil-containment booms.
This spring Cooley announced plans to double its American manufacturing capacity, which will mean equipment investment and new hiring at both the Pawtucket headquarters and a newer plant in Lancaster, S.C.
“Now everyone talks about being innovative, but I have never been to a company where innovation is completely ingrained like Cooley,” said President Dan Dwight, who was named to the company’s top job last summer. “From marketing and sales guys to the mad chemists in our state-of-the-art R&D center in Cranston, to the factory floor – there is a tremendous amount of science and art.”
Cooley is not alone among innovative, local textile companies.
In Cumberland, 129-year-old manufacturer Hope Global has started hiring after the recession thanks in part to increased exports of products such as high-strength boot laces.
In addition to laces and braided materials, Hope Global’s products now include knitted wire for automotive parts, bullet-proof curtains for firing ranges and window weather stripping. In Coventry, Concordia Fibers, which made its name in silk yarns, faced the decline of the region’s shrinking textile industry by moving into the medical bio-tissue sector. Last year, the successful Concordia Medical division was purchased by Biomedical Structures of Warwick.
“A lot of the folks I am talking to are either doing better or are feeling a little better about the direction to economy is heading,” said Bill McCourt, executive director of the Rhode Island Manufacturer’s Association. “You hear a lot about advanced manufacturing and high-tech, but I am hearing growth across the board. Folks who have found a niche or taken some of their processes and found other applications they could basically transfer their technology to are doing well.”
Although considered to be an industry of the country’s past by some during the recession, manufacturing has been doing well across the country this year.
The Institute for Supply Management reported that national manufacturing employment reached a nine-month high in April along with increased orders and production. The report was credited with triggering a rally in stocks in the United States and abroad.
At Cooley, Dwight attributes the company’s growth to a relentless drive to update and re-engineer its products, even when they already enjoy a large market share.
An example is billboards, where Cooley makes the surface materials for 70 percent of the signs in the country, but over the last several years has been working constantly to make them lighter, brighter and more environmentally sustainable.
Four years ago, Cooley’s billboards were made of PVC plastic, weighed 22 ounces per yard and required a crane to install.
Since then Cooley has gotten the material weight down to 7 ounces per yard, light enough for a worker to carry it on his shoulder, without losing any durability or graphic quality. Now Cooley is rolling out a 5.3-ounce per yard polyethylene billboard material that, after being used, can be ground up and returned to the company to be formed into new billboards.
“The whole process has brought the cost down,” Dwight said. “People always think going green is going to cost more. It costs less. From a cost-management standpoint, our single biggest cost is raw materials and the more oil fluctuates, the more our costs fluctuate. The more we can use re-grinds the better.”
Another Cooley project focused on sustainability is the use of solar-power-illuminated billboards.
In the engineered membrane side of the business, Cooley’s ability to adapt allowed it to take advantage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where it provided the majority of containment booms, and now the emerging hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” market.
Fracking, which extracts natural gas through the pumping of high-pressure liquids into the ground, requires a number of hazardous chemicals which Cooley provides portable storage containers for.
Dwight said the specifics of Cooley’s expansion plans have not yet been finalized, but the company intends to grow its capacity at both the Pawtucket and South Carolina plants without expanding the footprints at either.
Right now the company employs 200 workers total, 150 of them in Rhode Island, and the expansion is estimated to result in 50 new workers split between the two locations.
As it looks toward the future, Dwight said Cooley is focused on seeking out new markets so its innovations don’t just serve existing customers.
“Since I have been with Cooley, we are constantly developing new products and cannibalizing ourselves,” Dwight said. “The question is, how do we go after other markets and how many other potential customers around the world are out there? •

No posts to display