Thermoformer Display Pack Inc. has purchased a large manufacturing building in Cedar Springs, Mich.
Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Display Pack is acquiring the 395,000-square-foot site for an undisclosed price from footwear and apparel firm Wolverine Worldwide. The new site will allow Display Pack to relocate manufacturing work from its Grand Rapids headquarters, which is about 20 miles south of Cedar Springs.
Once occupied by Display Pack, the building will employ 250 and will allow Display Pack to add 50 new jobs as well, President Victor Hansen said in a Feb. 23 phone interview.
“We had outgrown our current facility, where we'd been since 1979,” he said. “It was a hundred-year-old building and we were doing thermoforming work on several floors.”
Hansen added that Display Pack was limited at its current site by wooden floors that weren't strong enough to support some equipment and by ceilings that were only 12 feet high in some parts of the building. As a result, only about 20 percent of the 375,000 square-foot building was fully usable.
“The cost of moving materials and of upkeep kept going up, so we needed to make a move,” he explained.
Display pack also needs the room to accommodate growth. Sales in the firm's plastic packaging division — which represents more than 80 percent of its total — have grown 85 percent in the last three years, Hansen said, with growth of about 20 percent expected for 2015. Food packaging is Display Pack's fastest growing end market, and Hansen said the firm also is strong in retail consumer electronics.
“When the economy started to crash [in 2008], we knew things were going to change,” he added. “Our customers were placing smaller orders, so we invested in machinery that would allow us to make parts extremely fast.”
Display Pack soon will begin moving equipment to the Cedar Springs site. Wolverine will fully vacate the site by the end of 2017. About 90 jobs from Cedar Springs will be moved to other Wolverine locations in Michigan and Ohio.
Display Pack ranks as North America's 24th largest thermoformer, according to Plastics News' recent survey, with 2013 sales estimated at $80 million. Victor Hansen's father, Roger, founded the firm in 1967.
