Plastic furniture maker\u00a0POLYWOOD LLC is investing $35.3 million in a new factory in North Carolina, the most recent in a series of investments that have seen the company add substantial manufacturing capacity and take on outside investors.<\/p>\n
The Syracuse, Ind.-based company, which uses recycled HDPE as its raw material, will add up to 20 extrusion lines at its new Roxboro, N.C., facility, on top of 15 lines in place at its headquarters in Indiana. The North Carolina plant will also expand the company\u2019s plastic recycling capacity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have experienced exponential growth now for over 15 years,\u201d CEO Doug Rassi said in an email interview.<\/p>\n
POLYWOOD\u00a0makes outdoor tables and chairs, including a signature line of Adirondack chairs. To meet growing demand, Rassi said the company has developed a customizable, made-to-order business model to accommodate both brick and mortar stores and online sales through national chain stores.<\/p>\n
The East Coast investment comes after the company in 2015 doubled the size of its Indiana plant with a 260,000 square foot expansion, going from 250 employees to just over 500. Rassi said \u201cadditional planning for the Indiana campus is in the works.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goal is to reach 900 employees by 2023 as we continue to grow in Indiana and ramp up the facility in North Carolina,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s really the result of a well-executed plan in the grandest sense. To scale at this rate requires foundational planning.\u201d<\/p>\n
The North Carolina expansion was first disclosed in an Oct. 16 press release from North Carolina state economic development officials, who said the Roxboro plant will create 384 jobs over five years. Rassi expanded on the plans in an Oct. 22 email.<\/p>\n
He said the\u00a0POLYWOOD has developed manufacturing systems that can quickly fill orders for thousands of different product variations.<\/p>\n
\u201c[The company] has a very unique manufacturing model,\u201d he said. \u201cWe presently have over 15,000 unique SKUs [stock keeping units] for sale. We have the capability to build any of them on demand and ship the next day. Regardless of the origin or destination or nature of the transaction our system sorts it all out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company sells both through smaller retailers and through the websites of national chains including Home Depot and Target.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany in our industry have talked about e-commerce or bricks and mortar as if one must make a choice or have a preference as a selling channel,\u201d he said. \u201cOur vision of the future embraces both. More importantly we obsess [over] how the physical and digital worlds might work together to serve our customers.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2015, two Indiana-based investors, Oxford Financial Ltd. and Cardinal Equity Partners LLC, recapitalized\u00a0POLYWOOD to help fund growth plans.<\/p>\n
POLYWOOD\u2019s website said Rassi and a business partner, Mark Phillabaum, started the company in 1990 when they noticed government recycling programs were creating \u201csteadily growing mountains of recycled plastics\u201d that could be used to make plastic lumber and build furniture.<\/p>\n
In last three years, the company has also expanded into more plastics recycling in-house, rather than buying resins from others. The North Carolina factory will include recycling operations similar to what the company has added in Indiana, Rassi said.<\/p>\n
Rassi said through most of its history, the company focused on product design and manufacturing, and now that resin volumes are getting large enough, it\u2019s investing into more recycling.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us it is a matter of business decision priority,\u201d he said. \u201cOur early work has gone into the design of the products, systems and manufacturing techniques which are the really big value-add components to the business. The recycling step now has its value with incremental improvement over volume.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rassi said the company chose North Carolina for its second manufacturing location because it\u2019s central to both customers and raw materials, close to ports for import and export and because the state has a \u201cbusiness-friendly environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
North Carolina state officials have agreed to reimburse the company $3.3 million over 12 years from taxes and other payments, based on expected tax revenue from the new jobs and investment.<\/p>\n
Rassi said the company wants to keep a focus on manufacturing, customers and employee relations.<\/p>\n
\u201cSimply put, all of your processes and systems must be scalable,\u201d he said. \u201cYou must deliver legitimate value to your customers. A genuine culture that present and future employees want to be part of and thrive in is mandatory.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Plastic furniture maker\u00a0POLYWOOD LLC is investing $35.3 million in a new factory in North Carolina, the most recent in a series of investments that have seen the company add substantial manufacturing capacity and take on outside investors. The Syracuse, Ind.-based company, which uses recycled HDPE as its raw material, will add up to 20 extrusion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[5838,12617],"supplier":[15066],"class_list":["post-57985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-bioeconomy","tag-furniture","supplier-polywood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57985"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=57985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}