Lauren Plastics LLC, a division of Lauren International Ltd., has acquired Iso-Trude Inc., an extrusion and engineering company out of Spring Lake, Mich.
"We've been experiencing a good amount of growth across all of our businesses, and we started looking at options to continue with that growth," said Chuck Laney, president of Lauren Plastics. "We found Iso-Trude and they met a lot of the criteria that would make it a viable candidate."
Lauren Plastics acquired the company as a way to continue sales growth in the plastic profile extrusion arena, Laney said. Another reason for the acquisition was to provide additional space for manufacturing.
Lauren Plastics currently operates out of a 52,000-square-foot facility in New Philadelphia, Ohio, which is shared among three businesses, Laney said. As part of the transition, Lauren Plastics will move its operations from its facility in New Philadelphia to Iso-Trude's 220,000-square-foot facility in Spring Lake.
"We'll be relocating lines and some employees from Ohio to Michigan," he said. "It'll be a great addition to the building that we have here in Michigan — we'll be able to fill it up and get a nice manufacturing base to continue to grow."
Laney expects job losses to be minimal throughout the transition, as most of the Ohio employees will be relocated or absorbed into Lauren's sister companies.
"We see it as a positive on both sides," Laney said. "On the Michigan side we've already begun hiring people for the eventual joint operations here. On the Ohio side we've seen, over a four to six month period, a zero to low number of job losses … because of our companies and the number of opportunities we have to absorb some of the great people we have."
Craig Janusz, vice president and co-owner of Iso-Trude, agrees that the move will be a positive step on both sides, citing Iso-Trude's high-end extrusion capabilities and Lauren Plastics' value-added processes.
Lauren Plastics expects to start the transition to Spring Lake in early 2014, Laney said. He did not have a projection for when the project will be finished. The combined companies will operate under the name Lauren Plastics LLC.