Brushes with Fame

Mark Borsari didn't have a number handy to quantity just how large the 'twisted wire brush' market is--so he qualified matters instead.

"It's big ... much bigger than most people would think, certainly--twisted wire brushes are used everywhere," said Borsari, president of Palmer-based Sanderson-MacLeod, which has made a name for itself in this somewhat obscure, yet intriguing corner of the manufacturing sector. Well, sort of.

Actually, only residents of Palmer (and probably not many of them) and people in this business would likely know of this company's many claims to fame--including official status as the people who gave the world the twisted wire mascara brush--because its name never goes on the products it produces. Rather, it manufactures brushes of various sizes and shapes for the leading players in the cosmetics industry, gun-making realm, and health care sector, among others.

But while Sanderson McLeod, which now does millions in sales annually, isn't exactly a household name in homes, businesses, or hospitals--because its name isn't on the box--it is certainly known within this specific market, and recently, more people have come to know it or further appreciate it.

That's because the 55-year-old company, started by Ken Sanderson and Bruce MacLeod, recently took home the American Brush Manufacturers Association's William A. Codes Innovation in Excellence Award for 2011 for its creation of the Z-Tip. Patents are pending for this product, which represents a revolutionary new way of putting a protective tip on a twisted wire brash.

Recognizing that traditional medical brush tips have flaws that lead to scratching, scarring, and overall poor performance, the company created a new manufacturing process using "high-energy fusion-welding technologies to melt a pre-constructed core

wire section of a twisted wire brush into a consistent, smooth, and inseparable brush tip," said Borsari.

But the Sanderson-MacLeod story is about more than just innovations with brush tips. Indeed, it's also about what Borsari called the "journey." This would be the company's five-year initiative in the broad realm known as 'lean.'

This has been a process with many programs and components to initiate and then measure improvement, including items called 'mood chips.' These are poker chips complete with happy, sad, and neutral faces, and are designed to show--through the volume of each collected from the various departments--where potential problems could be forming, said Rebecca Gibson, human resources manager for the company.

While Sanderson MacLeod's product lines may be atypical, its efforts with regard to doing things better, faster, and more efficiently have become part of doing business for many area manufacturers. And for this issue and its focus on that important sector, BusinessWest takes an indepth look at a Palmer institution that's been a leader in its industry and a model for many smaller area manufacturers.

Scratching the Surface

Tracing the history of Sanderson MacLeod, Borsari said that, from the start, this company has been a problem-solver as much as a manufacturer.

Indeed, since the beginning, players in the cosmetics industry, health care sector, and household-cleaning-products realm, among others, have challenged the company's product engineers to essentially come up with answers to their problems--and the needs of consumers--and take on the assignments that most traditional brush makers didn't want.

That included oven-cleaning brushes, sewing-machine brushes, double-end-razor brushes, and many others, said Linda Mitchell, vice president of Administration for the company and a long-time employee. "We started as a company that was going to focus on markets that the other brush makers didn't want to pursue."

And this was reflected in the original name for the venture--Specialty Brush.

The twisted wire mascara brush is perhaps the most famous case in point, said Borsari. "Right after they started Sanderson MacLeod, they were approached by a cosmetic artist in California with the idea of putting on mascara with a twisted wire brush," noting that before this, the material was applied with a comb or something resembling a screw. "Sanderson MacLeod went to work; they already had the twisting equipment, and submitted a few prototypes.

"The company was actually given the first patent on the mascara brush back in 1956," he continued. "We invented it right here in Palmer, Massachusetts, and had the patent on it for many years."

That development provided the momentum for explosive growth, he continued, adding that within a few years, the company had more than 300 employees (the number is about 100 now). Over the ensuing decades, Sanderson MacLeod expanded its portfolio of products as different sectors have developed new uses for the twisted wire brush.

The health care industry is a prime example; in the mid-80s, the company started manufacturing many products for that sector, including endoscopy-cleaning brushes, cell-collection brushes, stylets, and other types of medical brushes, all employing the same basic technology applied to the mascara brush.

Products now shipped out of the warehouse vary in size from models four feet long and two inches wide (used to dean industrial tubes) to items--usually bound for health care providers and precision-part makers--that are a mere quarter-inch in diameter. Collectively, the growing product line represents a unique niche.

"There's not another company in the country that specializes in just twisted-wire brushes," he explained. "There are other companies that do it, but they also make brooms and paintbrushes and everything else; all we do is large-volume contract manufacturing."

Recently, the Z-Tip represents the latest and most noteworthy example of this problem-solving ability and innovation, and its development has been reminiscent of the mascara brush in many ways.

"One of the biggest challenges companies have had has been protecting the end of the brush from either scraping into scopes or scarring patients, so putting a protective tip at the end of the brush was a big need," he explained. "Most of the ways they would do that were very expensive--either trimming by hand or dipping in acrylic by hand, which made a lot of that work go overseas.

"We needed to find a way to put a tip on a brush that was price-competitive, but would also be a better product," he continued, adding that, through collaboration with an East Granby, Conn. laser specialist, the Z-Tip was developed.

Getting Leaner

Beyond its problem-solving capabilities, the company's strengths have always been diversity and a strong track record for quality, said Ted Snyder, director of Operations. He noted that these qualities have enabled the company to record steady revenue

growth and successfully ride out the economic downturns, including the last one, that traditionally take a heavy toll on manufacturers.

Elaborating, he said that no company or business sector is truly recession-proof, yet the twisted wire brush sector has proven especially resilient over the years, because if a particular client base was cutting back, others would pick up. And during the recession, and for varying reasons, years, the gun industry, the health care sector, and even the cosmetics realm saw upticks.

"I would say we're recession-resilient," Snyder told Business West. "Out diversity is really an asset with regard to the economy and its ups and downs."

But while volume of business has not been a problem for Sanderson MacLeod historically, the cost of doing business remains an issue for it--and any other manufacturer in the Northeast, said Borsari. "That's the burden we fight all the time," he said, noting that what competition the company has is mostly overseas, where the costs of labor are exponentially lower.

And it was with an eye toward reducing costs, minimizing waste, and maximizing waste, and maximizing efficiency that the company started down that journey, he continued. "We realized that, although we were doing very well, for us to stay relevant going forward, we had to take an honest look at how we were doing as a company.

"We did a lot of research, and we had a lot of people come in and tell us what we were doing well and what we weren't doing so well," he continued. "We took tours all over New England, looking at different companies and how they took the lean journey, and then we got right into it."

The company received a workforce-training grant in early 2010, said Mitchell, and put it to use on a variety of lean initiatives, especially training initiatives designed to widen skill sets and empower the workforce.

In general, the lean initiatives have been focused on two goals, said Gibson: getting employees to take full ownership of their specific part of the operation, and improving the lines of communication--through a number of vehicles, including mood chips--so that, when problems or concerns arise, leadership knows about them and can then work with employees to solve them.

And a big key to the success of the lean initiative, she continued, has been effective measuring of results and keeping employees aware of where improvements have been recorded.

"We post about 10 to 15 sets of metrics every single month as to how we perform compared to the prior month," she explained. "We keep them up for at least a year; they're posted there for all the employees to see, and as soon as they're posted, you'll see a group of people around the board wanting to look at that, especially if they've been involved in a particular project."

Borsari agreed.

"We spent an enormous amount of time talking to people on the floor and finding what wasn't working well with them," he explained. "We really looked into the comers, and we were really honest with ourselves about what we doing well and what we weren't doing well, and then we enlisted the support of everyone in the company."

Small Wonder

Despite the company's more-than-half-century track record for success, Borsari said, its name is simply not known other than to those who are a part of the industry.

That's because its name isn't on any of the twisted-wire products it sends out the door of the plant on South Main Street.

"But it's fair to say that, when you walk down the aisles at CVS, the lion's share of the twisted-wire brushes that you see come from Sanderson MacLeod," he said, adding that the same is true of the medical industry.

Such anonymity, if that's the right word, hasn't stifled growth or innovation in any way for this company, which knows that, even if its name isn't on the package, its reputation lies inside.

And that's what has led to many brushes with fame.