Phoenix stays a step ahead of customers as it opens second Indiana plant

Phoenix Closures Inc.'s job is to make plastic closures and plenty of them.

But the injection molding company also is tasked with anticipating trends and customer demands and acting accordingly.

"We're in the business of making sure that we're keeping our capacity ahead of our customers, so it's not uncommon that we already have a property that we purchased" ahead of actual need, co-President Alby Miller said.

And that's exactly what Naperville, Ill.-based Phoenix did in Bloomington, Ind., five years ago with the acquisition of a massive former Otis Elevator Co. facility in anticipation of future growth. "We like to buy older buildings and refurbish them," Miller said.

This time around, the company is spending more than $30 million and eventually creating 125 new jobs.

Phoenix currently is utilizing about half of the 450,000-square-foot building for production and warehousing while leasing out the other half to a tenant. Plans are to eventually expand into the entire building as the business continues to grow.

Phoenix now has five locations, including a plant about an hour from Bloomington in Greencastle, Ind. The proximity of those two sites, Miller said, is no coincidence as Phoenix wanted to rely on the stability of the Greencastle location to help launch and support the new site.

"Being an hour away, it really allows us to promote from within and share that tacit knowledge that our employees have of the equipment as we train new employees," Miller said.

The Bloomington site currently has about 30 workers and expects that number to increase over the next four years. Some of those staffers came to Bloomington from Greencastle, including some who now enjoy a shorter commute to the new location.

"It was a logical extension to have that be geographically closer to the other facility," Miller explained.

"When we looked at this, we also did a geographic look at where our current and near-term future customers would be and this location fit well with that as well," said Doug Drewes, vice president of strategy and business excellence.

Phoenix is a sixth-generation, family-owned company founded in 1890 that has historically made its money in the continuous thread closure business. But the firm has branched out in recent years to also include dispensing and child-resistant products.

Key markets for Phoenix include food, beverage, nutrition, home, personal care, consumer health care and chemical. Look under the cap of a peanut butter or mayonnaise jar, for example, and the Phoenix name is a common sight regardless of brand.

The company is now led by brothers and co-Presidents Alby Miller and Giles Miller, who took over day-to-day responsibilities from their father, Bert Miller.

Alby Miller admittedly is the less serious brother, with Giles tending to be quieter, Alby Miller explained. As co-presidents and family members, it is their job to figure out how to run the company harmoniously with an eye toward success.

Alby Miller, during a Jan. 20 interview to discuss the new project, did not take himself too seriously and at different times sprinkled in pop culture references, including the movies Saw and Rain Man. But he also made something very clear: Family values drive Phoenix.

"The theme that Giles and I usually go with is, as far as the family goes, is you lead with love and you let the rest follow," he said. "The real secret is not having a lot of family in your business and try to run it like a real business.

"Everybody loses if we can't get along. So Giles and I, even if we have an impasse on a subject, we have a mediator to just help sort it out, which is really our head of human resources," Alby Miller explained.

Meeting somewhere in the middle is usually the solution, he said. Phoenix, while privately owned, also has a board of advisers to help steer the company.

Drewes spent much of his career working for publicly traded companies before coming to Phoenix, and he likes the change.

"The companies I was in before were in more of the cost-down mode vs. growth-up mode. The focus on growth and the focus on where do we go next and really embracing the people and the people's ideas throughout the entire organization is a key to the success of Phoenix," Drewes said.

With the additional space in the Bloomington facility eventually going to Phoenix, the company can take a bit of a pause on future growth planning — but not too long. Drewes said it would probably be just a couple of years before the company starts formulating new expansion plans.

"This is an exciting time for Phoenix," Giles Miller said in a statement. "We have been expanding our product lines and introducing a new production facility will allow us to continue to provide high-quality closures as quickly as possible to our customers."

Phoenix now has more than 1 million square feet under roof at locations in Naperville; Newport, Tenn.; Davenport, Iowa; Greencastle and Bloomington.

The company was founded in 1890 by John S. Giles as Safe Glass Co. in Bowling Green, Ohio. The development of a new closure system to replace cork stoppers in the company's handmade glass jars brought the company into the closures manufacturing business. It wasn't until 1939 that the company starting compression molding plastic closures, but production was limited due to high resin costs and restrictions associated with World War II.

The company, in 1959, purchased its first injection molding machine and changed its name to Phoenix Closures in 1966 "to reflect its new commitment to thermoplastics," according to the firm's website.

The company is operating Husky injection molding machines ranging from 300 to 700 tons of clamping force at the new location with plans to increase the range to 800 tons in the future, Alby Miller said.