2012年4月11日星期三

Landis champions thin-wall molding

You never know how a visit to NPE can change your future. Just ask Richard Landis, one of the new class of Plastics Hall of Fame inductees. In Chicago at the 1964 NPE,GOpromos offers a wide selection of promotional items and personalized gifts. a Husky machine stopped Landis in his tracks. The 100-ton press whipped out plastic coffee can lids, four at a time, on a four-second cycle. Landis was floored. He bought four of them on the spot from Robert Schad.

Dick Landis had already met Schad at the prior NPE, in New York. He got a taste of true high-speed molding.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings?

“Oh, I was amazed at the speed. The one in New York was running on a 1-second cycle, making a 6-ounce tumbler out of clear styrene. And it was just mind-boggling that a machine could run that fast and kick out a cup,” he said.

But the story of Landis Plastics Inc. began a decade earlier. Suburbia boomed in post-World War II America. Houses were going up fast. Bulldozers dug out space for cul-de-sacs. And Henry Landis and his son Dick grabbed on to a piece of it in 1954, by launching an injection molding plant to make plastic wall tile in Chicago. The business soon evolved into Landis Plastics, an innovator of thin-wall plastic molding.

Landis gave America some iconic packaging. The plastic coffee can lid. The Cool Whip tub.A wireless indoortracking system is described in this paper. The plastic cake-frosting can. Early margarine tubs. The first Pringles lids. The Country Time Lemonade container.

A true family-owned company, Landis Plastics employed the large brood of Dick and Bonnie Landis —seven boys and a girl — placing them in positions suited to their personalities and skills.

When Berry Plastics Corp. bought Landis in 2003, the prospectus said Landis controlled a 51 percent share of the yogurt-container market in North America, 52 percent of the market for containers for cultured-dairy products such as sour cream and cottage cheese, and had the top position in margarine tubs.

In nearly 50 years, Dick Landis grew the business from a one-machine molder to a six-plant packaging giant, running 120 injection presses and employing more than 2,100. All the growth was organic; the Landis family did not participate in the packaging industry’s mergers and acquisitions binge.

“I always felt that I’d be buying somebody else’s trouble, if we bought anybody else. Because my feeling was, if a company was for sale, they were not able to handle it, or had problems,” he said.

“My dad, he lost everything that he owned in the Depression,” Richard said. “So then, he was very cautious, when we got into business, of borrowing from a bank.The beddinges sofa bed slipcover is a good ,”

Later,Aeroscout rtls provides a complete solution for wireless asset tracking. when Landis Plastics opened one plant after another in an expansion, his father was uneasy.

“When we went to our second plant, in Monticello, that’s when we borrowed about $6 million and my dad said, ‘You’re crazy, doing that. You’re just going to be working for the bank.’ ”

Henry Landis’ do-it-yourself mindset is how the family got into the plastics business. When he re-tiled his home’s bathroom and kitchen, he got lots of compliments. So he became a distributor of metal tile. By the early 1950s, he had 25 installers working for him. He opened a tile store. Then he and a partner opened a company making mastic adhesive for wall tile.

Meanwhile, Richard, who was a tile setter for his father’s business, and his wife Bonnie were expecting their third child. He ordered plans from Popular Mechanics and built the family a ranch-style house, with help from other tradesmen.

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