Revere has four plants — in Clyde; Poplar Bluff, Ark.; Jeffersonville, Ind.; and Brampton, Ontario — and 275 presses, mostly large tonnage machines. Those locations are convenient for the appliance industry — Clyde is just down the street from a major Whirlpool plant, for example.
“Whirlpool and General Electric are our biggest appliance customers by far,” Drummond said in a recent interview at Revere's headquarters plant.
Revere Plastics may not be a familiar name to everyone in the plastics industry, especially for a company its size. But some of the company's predecessors may ring a bell.
The company can trace its roots back to Wollin Products Inc., a Stevensville, Mich., molder that was a major Whirlpool supplier.
Originally a family owned company, Charter Oak Capital Partners LP bought Wollin in the 1990s, then merged it with another plastics holding, Plastic Engineered Components Inc. of Lincolnshire, Ill., in 2001.
The combined firm was rebranded as Titan Plastics Group. Soon after the merger a recession hit and the company downsized, consolidating 16 plants into nine.
More consolidation followed — Titan closed plants in Brea, Calif.; Monterrey, Mexico; and El Paso, Texas, in the mid-2000s, while consolidating work and continuing to invest in some larger plants, including the Clyde factory, and then building a new factory in Jeffersonville, which is near GE's appliance headquarters in Louisville, Ky.
Today the Clyde plant is Revere's largest by far, with 310,000 square feet of space, 606 employees and 155 presses.
In 2005 Charter Oak combined three of Titan Plastics' plants with three other businesses to create Revere Industries LLC, an Indianapolis-based company that also had metal operations. Revere Plastics is the plastics arm of Revere Industries.
In 2009 primary debt holder Tennenbaum Capital Partners LLC of Santa Monica, Calif., took over Revere Industries, and the new owner started to make changes in 2013 — including fresh capital investment and the push to diversify the customer base.
The appliance market has changed significantly in the past decade, with offshore companies like Samsung and LG taking a bigger share of the North American market. Even buying patterns have changed, as retailers have focused on selling big-ticket items like washers and dryers with deep discounts on Black Friday sales.
The leadership team at Revere Plastics stressed that the appliance market will always be the company's key end market sector.
“My vision is, five years down the road, I want to keep moving up the rung with customers who really want to partner with us. Like some of our customers do now,” Fish said.
Revere Plastics also has customers in the outdoor power equipment sector.
Laura Price, the company's director of sales for its Whirlpool business, said the company's technologies help separate it from its competitors. That includes a wide variety of molding, including stack, two-shot and overmolding, as well as a long list of secondary operations.
“We have the ability to give you not just a plastic part, but a complete assembly. These are capabilities that our competitors don't have,” she said. “We have expertise in tooling, screw types, automation. We're very good at problem solving. And we do seven or eight different types of welding.”
The company also is proud of its engineering resources, which include 15 engineers in Clyde, three in Jeffersonville, four in Poplar Bluff and one in Brampton.
“We can take two parts and make them one. Take metal parts and convert them to plastics. These are areas where we can try to help solve problems for customers,” Price said.
Like many plastics processors that are in expansion mode, the company is faced with challenges when it comes to hiring new workers. Fish said Revere spends a lot of money on training. He calls it “growing talent from scratch.”
“We definitely have the ingenuity gene here. We like to solve things. Tricky things. We are very good at solving problems,” Fish said.
