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Mount Pleasant, S.C., --January 29, 2004-- You may never have heard of Multiplastics, but there's a good chance you've seen their products. The Mount Pleasant company has been around for more than 50 years, and in that time it has made odds and ends of plastic for a range of uses from navigational buoys and packing materials to parts for SUVs and golf carts. One way the company has kept its business afloat during the recent economic downturn has been to keep looking for even more ways to put more plastic into more products. "We work for every industry," said company president Deborah Herbert. "That's what keeps our creative juices flowing." Multiplastics is a division of Curd Enterprises, founded in the Chicago area in 1952 by Herbert's parents, Robert F. and Dorothy Dailey Curd. The family, and the company, moved to the Charleston area in 1965. Herbert went to work for the company in 1979 and became president in 1992. Originally, the company made fiberglass display items, such as a giant statue of "Nipper," the music-loving dog, for RCA's Rochester, N.Y. plant. Later, the company shifted into plastics and built a business making navigational buoys. When Curd Enterprises first arrived, it occupied a 10,000-square-foot space in North Charleston. The company has grown since then, currently occupying a 138,000-square-foot plant and distribution center on Long Point Road. It employs about 40 people. The company's buoys, which are used by numerous state and federal agencies including the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and the Army Corps of Engineers, are made under the Curd name, while its other, diversified plastic products are made under the Multiplastics brand. The plant houses a variety of plastic molding machines that can produce items up to 16 feet long. Robot routers trim the molded parts to a precision of 2/1,000ths of an inch, as required for the company to qualify as an ISO 9001-certified supplier for automakers and other industrial customers. Slowdowns in those customers' business since 2000 had a trickle-down effect on her business, Herbert said. "Suddenly, the phones stopped ringing," she said. "We work with so many large customers, and suddenly they didn't need parts. We had to respond." Herbert is especially proud that she was able to avoid laying off any employees during the downturn. Instead, the company switched to four-day workweeks and cut back on hours. It's important to retain workers, she said, because the operation of the company's machinery requires fairly extensive training. Business has picked up since the big crunch a couple of years ago, however, in part because of the company's in-house product-design capabilities. Paul D. Spies, vice president, explained that Multiplastics' engineers can design a part on a computer, create a prototype mold and manufacture a working part, all in-house. With that part -- which can range from a small piece of molding for the interior of a car to an entire kayak hull -- the company can go to potential customers and show them exactly how much weight and how many dollars the customer can save by switching to plastic from, say, fiberglass. That innovative approach has allowed the company to win some unusual contracts, including the design and manufacture of the plastic pans attached to the Isle of Palms connector that catch oil-tainted runoff and prevent it from draining into the sensitive marsh environment below. More recently, Multiplastics has been providing transparent compartments
for the world's first see-through-bottom kayak. Click here to view more current news articles Did you find this material interesting? Comment via FEEDBACK
Source: The Post and Courier
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