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Drawing a Bead
One of Bridgeport's most venerable family firms meets
new manufacturing challenges
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Business New Haven
4/20/1998
By: BNH
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Bridgeport has historically been known for precision manufacturing. However, many companies that helped to build the city's reputation are but a memory. One of the few that has managed to survive, and now is even grappling successfully with such challenges as major Asian competition, is Bead Industries.
Bead is one of the Park City's oldest companies. Its original name - the Bead Chain Manufacturing Co. - more accurately describes its principal product.
Bead is one of but two significant remaining domestic manufacturers of beaded chain. Every time you pull on a closet light, open the vertical blinds in your office, or add a new key to your key chain, you are likely to be using an item manufactured by Bead.
The company got its start in 1912 when W.J. Gagnon and G.W. Goodridge developed and patented a new type of machine capable of making chains of uniformly sized beads with uniform tensile strength. Beaded chain itself was not new. But prior to that time, most of it had been imported, and was of unpredictable quality.
The widescale introduction of gas and electric lighting fixtures with pull sockets in the early years of the century, coupled with the advent of World War I, which curtailed supplies of imported chain, made Gagnon's and Goodridge's invention a sure winner.
In 1914 the two men, along with W.C. Bryant and his son, W.G. Bryant, formed the Bead Chain Manufacturing Co. and built a single-story plant. The demand for chain was so great, by 1916 the company had moved into larger quarters - the first two stories of Bead's present building - on Mountain Grove Street.
In the years following the Great War, the need for beaded chain remained steady. Then came World War II, when demand increased radically. Bead was selected by the U.S. government to make all the I.D. tag necklaces - a/k/a dogtags - worn by American and Canadian servicemen. In all, more than 22 million I.D. necklaces were delivered by Bead to the U.S. and Canadian militaries.
Today, Bead continues in the forefront of beaded-chain manufacture, fabricating some 2,000 different assemblies that involve bead chain.
In the 1920s Bead engineers found that the same basic manufacturing process used to make beaded chain could also be employed to make radio contact pins more economically than methods then in use. The process Goodrich and Gagnon patented is called “autoswagging,” in which the metal is formed, rather than cut away, to produce the desired finished product. Autoswagging saves between 20 and 50 percent on waste and scrap. Bead's contact pins substantially reduced the cost of radio tubes.
Since the 1920s, Bead has gone on to make a wide variety of pins for the electronics, computer and other industries. “Today,” explains Bead President Clayton Rowley, “we're in computers, cruise controls, any sort of connector you can think of.”
Nevertheless, Rowley says, “Chain has always been the mainstay of the business. It helps you through good and bad. Electronics is up and down, tied in to consumer spending.”
As well, he notes, “With the connector business, components are changing all the time. Parts change every two to three years. Salesmen have to be there all the time.” To keep pace, in the last year Bead increased by half the number of manufacturer's rep agencies with which it does business, and increased its total manpower in the field by 100 percent.
Rowley, son-in-law of current board chairman W. D. Bryant, is the fourth generation of family members to work at Bead. Rowley came on board in early 1995, and by the fall had already attained the president's office.
Almost immediately the new president was confronted with a critical challenge: Beaded chain sales, always the company's mainstay, were being very seriously threatened by new Asian manufacturers. “The Asians can deliver chain to a customer's door at $55 per 1,000 feet,” Rowley explains. “For me to make a profit, I had to get $71 per 1,000 feet F.O.B., or $73 delivered.”
Rowley tackled this serious threat to his No. 1 product with energy and ingenuity, and is seeing his efforts meet with some success. One tactic he has used has been to stress the superior quality of Bead chain.
“Some companies care about quality,” he says. Too many, however, are content with an inferior product - if they pay less for it.
Rowley's main strategy has been to fight the Asians' cheap labor with American ingenuity. “We've always led in technology, brain power,” he notes. He decided to totally overhaul Bead operations, and do whatever he could to streamline processes.
When he took over, Rowley recalls, employees had been doing things the same way for decades. Although people may have balked a little, he set out to find the most efficient way to do everything from management down to manufacturing. Now, he says,” People who run different departments are given the freedom to run their own departments. There is an open-door management policy.”
Rowley also reconfigured the physical plant. “It used to be very labor-intensive,” he explains. “We changed how everything was laid out, from a manufacturing perspective.” He was especially eager to get input from the employees on the production floor. “They're the ones who handle it day in and day out,” he reasons.
Now, Rowley says, “Eighty-five people make more than they did when I came on with 106 [workers]. Now I've got our prices down to high $50s to low $60s, through reorganizing things on the floor.”
Another tactic Rowley has employed to bolster Bead's competitiveness has been to aggressively investigate foreign markets. Previously, Bead's foreign exports were “pretty minimal,” Rowley acknowledges. Now, “We've done extensive studies of Latin America. We've been looking heavily into Chile.” In Mexico, “The one bead chain company shut down for a while to retool. That gives us a window of opportunity.”
Finally, Rowley and his managers have been brainstorming ways to add more value to the Bead chain by selling it retail rather than to OEMs, as the company has mainly done in the past. One coup Rowley has scored with this creative approach has been a patented new idea for using an I.D. tag system to help teachers and other youth leaders keep track of students while on field trips.
Although Bead has secured several hundred patents over the course of its history, Rowley reports that the process for the I.D. tags was highly unusual in that the paperwork sailed right through the patent office without a single challenge. Bead hopes the tags will be just one of many new products. “We have a five-year plan to introduce more products over time,” Rowley says.
“Last year was our best year ever,” Rowley reports. And while the challenges of competition - Asian and otherwise - can never be completely solved, it is instructive to note how entrepreneurial ingenuity can and does keep an old family business alive and well in the face of such daunting contemporary challenges.
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