History

by Didier (DJ) de Gery

I started CRC in 1986 after having worked in a computer disk manufacturing company and spending a year consulting to rotary die manufacturers.  Having seen a high tech company peek and crash.  The technology behind rotary converting seemed to me both more stable and with a longer useful life.  Like computers, converting is used in a wide variety of industries and products.  Converting technology is also evolving, but there is not the rapid obsolescence built into the computers.

The initial plan was to use my knowledge of converting and engineering and offer converting services to the trade.  This is why the company is called Custom Rotary Converting (now Inc.).  Indeed, we got some challenging jobs from the start.  We still get repeat orders for the first product we made. 

The first years were a real struggle as the business was 'boot strapped' with the help of a small family loan and a heavy dose of sweat equity.  I was fortunate enough to have some friends who worked with me in those early days of hard work and little pay.   Fructuoso and Teresa Gomez are still with me today.

My engineering background prepared me for the technical challenges, but not for the accounting or marketing hurdles.  To make it through those times, we took on consulting work and the building of die cutting modules.  Gradually, we made and rebuilt larger segments of converting machinery, until we had the opportunity to design and build a complete floppy disk jacket machine.  In the early '90s, we sold several of these machine, as well as a slitter and some other floppy machinery, to companies in mainland China.

Eventually, the floppy disk market died, even in China.  In the next few years we tried to find a niche in the converting machinery market in the US.  We build several custom machines and developed a line of modular presses which we hoped would give us a product to sell rather than a service.  While we sold a few machines, the sales were erratic and most customers wanted the machines to be customized to their particular needs.   While we never lacked work, we encountered unacceptable cash flow swings and could not grow.

In '96, after analyzing the books and reviewing our goals, we reached the decision to get back to our original focus.  Thus started our transition away from building machinery for others, towards building our own machinery base and offering services.   We had also learned a few hard lessons about accounting and marketing.  In '98 we dropped our machine building ads and took out full page ads under die cutting.  We also built the clean room, purchased the steel rule cutting equipment and built a 60" laminator/slitter as well as several narrow web presses.

The win-win nature of relationships between customer and converter played a major roll in our deciding to focus on providing die cutting services.  Because the business activities tend to be fairly regular (once a month, a quarter or a year) there is a mutual interest in each other's well being.  We get most of our business through word of mouth.  There is a good reason for this: we take care of our customers and they appreciate it.  We also like going home at night knowing we are part of our customer's success.

Having sold equipment to many of the local converters and knowing them personally, we decided to go after technologies that would complement their efforts instead of competing directly with them.  That is why we focus on rotary  cutting, wide web slitting, and hot melt coating.  In mid '98. anticipating rapid growth, we incorporated the business.

In 1999, we were able to purchase the property which we had rented for the last 13 years. This was a big boost to us since it allowed to make structural changes and optimize the buildings for our use.

We have seen our greatest growth in areas requiring special skills and equipment such as ultrasonic die cutting, hot melt coating of specialty films, inline die cutting and packaging, and medical products requiring clean rooms.

CRC is moving to a new level of growth where we can now pursue large industrial customers who require many millions of parts made per year. It is with these customers that our core competence come to best use: we develop processes and machinery which will make large volumes of complex converted parts efficiently.