With more than 30 years in the industry, innovation, flexibility and perseverance have been cornerstones of success for George Braddon and the companies he founded, Commodore Plastics LLC and Commodore Technology. Retired with his wife, Kathryn, to a house in Florida, George's primary duties are now, he says, "walking the dog, playing a bit of golf and going out on the boat from time to time." But George still keeps a toe in the industry and indulges his love of innovation by going into the plant when he is home, talking with the engineers and fielding periodic calls for his thoughts on a problem or question. He recently spoke with Plastics Machinery Magazine contributing writer Lisa Jo Lupo.
In 1981, you were working for Mobil Chemical when you decided to found your own company. Why did go out on your own?
Braddon: Why did I jump off the cliff? Working for Mobil was great. In 1967, when I went to work there, it was very entrepreneurial. It was run by Howard Samuels; he was the real spirit of the place. But when he left, the company got "Mobilized," as I call it. It was all about managing the money, and innovation just got more and more difficult. So I left to start my own company.
At the time, Mobil Chemical was the major producer of foam packaging. It looked like it was in a pretty good business, and I had the opportunity to get some used equipment. I also had talked with a number of people in the industry who really wanted another supplier — there weren't many options. They said they would welcome me being able to supply their trays. So I took the used equipment and started up.
What motivated you to begin making your own equipment rather than buying it?
Braddon: We started with some basic items, but I soon found that wasn't going to work. We really needed a whole catalog of products, which would require maybe 15 tools. There was no way I could afford to buy all those tools, so we experimented with ways to make them. We were the first in the industry to use serrated blades [used to cut foam trays from web], and we went through several iterations before we got the one that worked best, which we still use today with some minor modifications. It took a long time to perfect it. I held a patent on it, which is now expired, but that helped us a lot because we were able to build tools very quickly.
As far as equipment, we started out fixing up used thermoformers and selling them, then we started making them from scratch because there wasn't any more used equipment available. Basically, we were cutting them down to the frame anyway, so we were doing more work stripping the old one off and cleaning them up than we would to just cut some tubes up and weld a frame.
What were some of the greatest challenges of the early years?
Braddon: When we started, I didn't necessarily want to make meat trays. The original plan was to make some specialty foam packaging for industrial items, but that never really worked out. We never could really get a breakthrough in industrial acceptance.
One of the most difficult things was sales. It took a long time to develop the company in the beginning; it was hard to come by sales. Then we hired a sales guy for the summer of '84 or '85, a graduate of Cornell [University]. He went to Pittsburgh, then over to Columbus, [Ohio], then came back through Cleveland — and he came back with two orders, which was absolutely amazing. That got us going with some new business, and he stayed with us for quite a while.
So we were going along fairly well by '85, then the bank started giving us trouble; we ended up getting in a pinch financially. So we merged with a company called Lake Whales Plastics in Hopedale, Mass. We thought the merged company would be better. But since we were sort of drowning at the time and they threw us an anchor, it didn't really help, and in 1987, we went bankrupt. We were in Chapter 11 for about a year. So we shut down the Hopedale operation, got out of Chapter 11, and kept growing. We've had compounded growth ever since … well, not really. We had another travail. In '91, we had the fire. That really killed us for a while.
Tell me about the fire. Obviously, you persevered, and Commodore began building machines within a week afterward. How did you make that possible?
Braddon: In May '91, a fire burned the whole facility down. But we had an equipment order that was going to Ecuador at the time of the fire, so some of our guys went to a machine shop and built the parts there. Then, we built a building rather quickly and started to put equipment together, and we were able to complete the order for Ecuador. But the only thing we did from '91 to '94 was equipment.
Then in about '94 or '95, we bought a couple of used extruders, brought out the tools that had survived the fire and built another building. We put an extruder and two thermoformers there, built some polyethylene greenhouses where we stored rolls to keep them out of the weather [and less susceptible to fire]. We built our roll storage building as a separate building with a passive vent by opening the perimeters of the walls a couple feet up from ground level, so the blowing agent [butane] would go to the floor, exit the building and not accumulate.
Things picked up from there. Probably 60 percent of our sales were to Bunzl [Distribution USA Inc., St. Louis] as a preferred supplier. So they were very helpful in getting us going again.
Why have Russia and Central and South America been key markets for Commodore's equipment? How did you start selling to those markets — and why did you decide it's the right time to sell in North America?
Braddon: By the early '90s — before the fire — we had given up on using used equipment, we were building it from scratch. We had a sales rep for foam equipment who thought he could sell the equipment overseas. The first sale was in Puerto Rico, then we sold equipment to Ecuador and Jamaica, and it went on from there. It was smaller equipment that came into play for the smaller companies. We were selling equipment for even less than even the Korean and Taiwanese equipment manufacturers. We began in Russia by working in conjunction with another company that was selling there. Nobody was paying much attention to Russia. They had been buying Chinese and Taiwanese equipment, and they were having a lot of trouble with it. So we sold some equipment there and word got around: "Boy, this equipment really runs." From 2011 to 2013, we sold a lot of equipment to Russia, but I think that has now dried up or is going to soon.
We expect the BEC acquisition [to read about the company's acquisition of new die technology, refer to PMM's December issue, page 41] to help us here. We're able to make new products, basically extrusion, and hopefully that will be something we can grow with.
I'm very grateful my son has taken over the business. He's very astute and has brought in very good people to manage the company. I think he's probably doing a better job than I could've ever done with the aspects of the job today. I told him that once and he said he could never do what I did.
What do you see as your greatest reason for the success and longevity of the company?
Braddon: We are good at being flexible. A big company has a big extruder, and it's like they're driving a bus. But we're running a route in a Corvette, so we can be a lot more maneuverable. The big guys run a sheet width and design their molds to fit that width. We build our mold to be an efficient layout, then make the extruder sheet to match it, so that way we have less scrap. The business is pretty well predicated on the fact that you have to recycle all the scrap. We're selling resin, really; if we throw out resin, that's a big cost.
Of what industry innovation are you most proud?
Braddon: I'd say the development of the serrated blade. The state-of-the-art tooling is a hard cutting tool that incorporates a pass-through configuration where the part that is blank from the web passes through the tool and the parts come out stacked. Our patented serrated tool does the same configuration as a very expensive hard tool, but it cuts better and is less expensive.
What do you want your legacy to be?
Braddon: That I'm absolutely crazy. Being a contrarian — you gotta do what they say can't be done. You have to innovate; if you don't, you're going to get run over.
