Dow spin-off decks halls with lightweight composite

An economic downturn for Dow Chemical Co. 15 years ago turned out to be a blessing for one of its engineers, Chris Edwards, who had been working on a composites technology the company was no longer interested in commercializing.

At a meeting in 2002, Edwards recalls then-Dow CEO William Stavropoulos announced: "If it's not profitable today, and it's not profitable tomorrow, it's going to be gone Wednesday."

Maybe I can buy my patents back, Edwards thought. His work on a lightweight thermoplastic polyurethane composite that could mimic drywall had generated about a dozen patents, and he hated the idea of all of that just hitting a dead end.

"It was kind of a weird product. It was never going to be that $10 billion a year product the company wanted," he said.

So he broached the idea to his bosses of buying the patents from the company.

Reluctant at first, Dow told him he'd have to get third-party validation of commercial potential in the form of a venture-capital investment, Edwards said. Enter Lindsay Aspegren, a partner in North Coast Technology Investors LP, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based venture capital firm with an office in Midland, Mich., and deep ties to Dow.

They negotiated a deal to buy the patents, with North Coast eventually investing $600,000 in Fulcrum Composites Inc., which was formally spun off in April 2004. Dow continues to own a 21 percent stake. Dow has now merged to become part of DowDuPont Inc.

Since then, Fulcrum has carved out a profitable niche providing products for high-end construction projects. It employs five at a factory just east of downtown Midland, and Edwards expects sales next year of about $2 million.

Fulcrum makes curved panels that can be fitted over concrete columns in buildings, as lightweight frames for circular windows, kits for curved archways, one-of-a-kind displays for museums and any number of one-offs for construction managers.

Projects for museums include a big castle kids can climb on at the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia as well as displays at the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Ky.; the U.S. Institution of Peace in Washington; and the Midland Center for the Arts.

"We do everything from big construction projects to selling to a DIY guy doing his own bathroom," Edwards said.

The ultra-high-end Faena Hotel in Miami Beach, a Forbes Travel Guide five-star hotel that opened late in 2015, bought 5,000 of Fulcrum's curved panels. Tesla showrooms use them, too.

You can see Fulcrum's work throughout the new H Residence, a five-story office and condominium project built and managed in downtown Midland by Saginaw, Mich.-based Shaheen Development, used for items such as wine racks in kitchens to a curving blue ceiling in a conference room that evokes waves.

"We're happy to have stumbled into Chris. We use him to design things we thought up but couldn't figure out how to make," said Al Warr, Shaheen's project manager at the H. "And as long as we keep designing things we can't figure out how to build, we'll keep using him."