Glacial takes steps for growth with South Dakota expansion

Since its initial operations began in 2014, Glacial Lakes Rubber and Plastics LLC has moved at anything but a glacial pace.

The 70-person company in Watertown, S.D., works primarily in shoe sole rubber production for the consumer and military markets — with other footprints in automotive, agriculture and heavy off-road industrial applications — and also has thermoforming of plastics. It celebrated the grand opening of a $3.5 million, 40,000-square-foot expansion Aug. 30.

The expansion brings Glacial Lakes' total space at its relatively new campus to 71,000 square feet, with about 20 of 35 planned jobs added thus far. The company will look to top out — for the time being anyway — at 85 jobs.

The most recent addition more than doubles the company's space and follows a 2016 transition into the current facility, a move that kept the business in the 22,000-person Northeast South Dakota town, and filled a critical gap left by the 2014 departure of a Minnesota Rubber and Plastics manufacturing site to Mexico.

"I left Minnesota Rubber in January of 2014 and started this company in February of the same year," said Robb Peterson, founder and CEO of Glacial Lakes Rubber and Plastics. "I started with one other guy working with me. We would come in early in the morning and start making preforms and then spend the rest of the day molding parts. My wife and kids would come in after school to help inspect and package parts, and then I would do paperwork until late at night and then do it again the next day.

"We did that for the first year."

Business escalated and the workload soon spread across more employees for Glacial Lakes over the next year, with much of the company's growth rooted in a 2014 partnership established with North Brookfield, Mass.-based Vibram USA, an Italian-headquartered company known for its durable and form-fitting shoe soles that was the largest shoe sole provider for the U.S. Department of Defense.

"Once we were up and running, we quickly expanded our lines to take on more Vibram shoe soles ... and we were off to the races," Peterson said. "Before long we were running two full shifts and a third skeleton shift."

Glacial Lakes produces a spectrum of Vibram products, ranging from soling for high-performance athletic shoes to heat-resistant combat boots for the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Special Operations Forces.

"They were looking for a second source when they found us," Peterson said. "Vibram continues to be our primary sales driver, but we have seen significant growth in the safety industry. With multiple customers in that market, it is our biggest jump in revenue outside of shoe soles for Vibram. Vibram continues to bring more business as well."

While Vibram accounts for about 75 percent of Glacial Lakes' sales, Peterson said, the firm has experienced significant growth in other industries: automotive, agriculture and heavy off-road industrial applications. It uses NBR, chloroprene, SBR and EPDM, among other rubber compounds, in its products.

"Auto has been up a little this year compared to last, but agriculture and industrial applications have been lower than last year or steady," Peterson noted.

Other products available from Glacial Lakes include vehicle sound dampening items, bumpers, gaskets, nuclear waste parts, large cattle products for agriculture and heavy industry parts for semitrucks. The firm also produces overmolded liquid diaphragms.

Glacial Lakes saw about $9.5 million in sales in 2019, with 2020 sales dipping to about $7 million, due almost entirely to the economic downturns caused by the pandemic, Peterson said.

"We actually moved into the expansion just as the pandemic hit," he said. "We were able to get going in there, but most of the new equipment sat for the summer and early fall [of 2020] as many of those items did not get kicked off until much later.

"It's been a long time coming as we started building in 2019 and finished in January of 2020," he said. "However, by the time we got moved in, the pandemic was in full swing and we couldn't have our celebration until this year in August."

The company is estimating between $10 million and $10.5 million in sales for 2021, Peterson said, an increase driven in part by the recent expansion.

Specifically, the extra 40,000 square feet brings increased technology in rubber injection and plastic thermoforming and increases capacity in Glacial Lakes' compression molding for large tonnage. The expansion also added a clean room for adhesive and laminating operations and a full materials testing laboratory.

Eyeing growth in plastics demand, large-platen thermoformers were added, along with multiple rubber injection presses and a large-tonnage compression press, Peterson said.

Over the last couple years, the firm has added a press to produce fiberglass-reinforced polypropylene sheets, as well as equipment for 3D printing, allowing it to make smaller plastic prototypes.

"I think plastics is going to be a big boon for us because we have so much interest in being able to thermoform these structural sheets," Peterson said. "We had a customer who was looking for a specific type of molding. We saw there was a market for it regionally as well as something locally. We got a very positive response from manufacturers, so we're excited to be getting into that."

In 2018, Glacial Lakes caught the attention of the White House and was asked to represent South Dakota as part of President Donald Trump's Made in America Product Showcase in July of that year.

Companies in attendance met one on one with members of President Trump's cabinet and Vice President Mike Pence. Glacial Lakes took questions on improving manufacturing in the U.S.

One challenge iterated during the visit echoes across a range of manufacturing industries today, that of labor force hiring and retention.

"We're all looking for qualified talent," Peterson told Rubber News at the time. "We're looking for more people who can make these products. Obviously, the less regulation we have, the easier it is to make the product and market it. We don't have to spend money chasing down all those rules and regulations. But I think employment is a big challenge for a lot of people right now."

But it has been the local rather than national stage that has showcased Glacial Lakes' American-made roots, moving and expanding exclusively within the Heartland to the appreciation of the Watertown workforce.

"We have a great team of experts utilizing the labor pool from the former Minnesota Rubber plant that left Watertown. We have tried to get them all back on board," Peterson said. "We run a very lean operation with low overhead that gives us the opportunity to move quickly and keep costs low.

"We tackle tough-to-mold products that most people tend to run away from. It's been a lot of fun to grow this business with people I know and the team we have. I have managed many facilities over my career for different companies, and these are the best employees," he said.