Dordan makes progress as it shifts focus to medical packaging

Dordan Manufacturing Co., a Chicago-based thermoformer, has been expanding into the medical packaging sector over the last six years.

The family-owned company, which was opened by Edwin and Vivian Slavin in 1960, has altered its focus and has been seeing great feedback ever since. The company designs and manufactures packaging like medical device trays, blisters, kits and assembly trays.

Recently, the company became ISO 13485 certified. This certification involved thorough evaluations of Dordan's quality management system, and it is a milestone for the company. It validates the company's ability to consistently meet customer and regulatory requirements. The certification also reinforces Dordan's status as a reliable partner for medical device manufacturing, company officials said.

"It means more than the certification because it provides confidence and a road map about how to propagate or ensure the continued multigenerational success," said Chandler Slavin-Bond, chief marketing officer for Dordan. "I suppose it just means, to us, long-term sustainability for the company."

Slavin-Bond thinks being a family-owned company provides advantages compared with companies owned by equity firms.

Before getting into more thermoformed medical packaging, the company was focused on consumer electronic packaging. As consumer electronics went overseas and e-commerce rose, Dordan began to feel less confident in the industry.

"We've always emphasized quality. We've always been an engineering-focused manufacturing company," Slavin-Bond said. "The options for moving into a new market were pretty much, at this point, food or medical ... packaging."

Dordan decided on medical packaging over the food industry because it aligned with the company's core capabilities and being engineering and quality centered.

Dordan started the transition in 2018, after investing $2 million in a 3,200-square-foot Class 8 clean room for manufacturing.

Slavin-Bond said COVID-19 didn't affect the company and its transition much because the packaging development process is long. The process can take a couple of years, and Dordan has seen a lot of growth and some of its customer packaging volume has decreased.

"Since we invested in the clean room, we've seen really great returns," Slavin-Bond said. "We're in the process of investigating procuring a second machine."

The company has been growing its team throughout the process, adding three quality control associates and four engineers.