PBN Manufacturing Awards 2021
Overall Excellence at a Midsize Manufacturer: National Marker Co.
National Marker Co. has been creating safety identification signs and products since 1934. So when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the North Smithfield-based company was ready to begin helping others create signs and identification for an unprecedented time.
“We recognized very quickly at the end of February that we had to pivot very quickly in the organization and what the needs were going to be from a communication standpoint,” former CEO Michael Black said.
Black sold the company in December to Deerfield, Ill.-based Justrite Safety Group for an undisclosed amount. The company will continue to operate under the National Marker name.
Director of Operations Andrew Ellison remembers a meeting with Black in the early stages of the pandemic, in which Black said he refused to participate in any recession.
“We called a meeting with the executive leadership group, which included marketing, sales, myself, and we talked about the changes in business that we saw coming, and Michael basically turned to the [vice president] of business development and said, ‘You guys are going to have to do something different,’ ” Ellison said.
NMC then formed a rapid response team, which created 4,500 new products geared toward the pandemic over the course of the year and launched more than 500 products over two months.
“You go to a grocery store and there [are] signs on the floor reminding you to socially distance or go one way with the traffic patterns, and NMC led that way,” Ellison said. “We were first to market with a lot of those signage opportunities, and we jumped in front of the market and never looked back.”
In 2020, the company grew more than 25% in sales, which came with its own set of challenges. Nonessential employees worked from home; only the operations team was in the building every day to turn out products. Temperature checks and new protocols were frequent, and wearing masks was enforced.
Ellison credits the employees of NMC for its success.
“From the top to the bottom, it was amazing the response that people had. We walked in the door one day and said, ‘We have to make changes,’ and nobody said, ‘I don’t want to.’ Nobody said, ‘I’m not gonna,’ or ‘That’s not fair,’ ” Ellison said. Employees volunteered to move to a later night shift, and when production needs required a print center to be run 24 hours a day, employees would work 12-hour shifts. “What they did was they stepped up and said, ‘OK. Tell us where to go, what to do and we’ll do it.’ And I thought that part was just remarkable … the amount of buy-in from the group,” Ellison said.
Black also praised the work of NMC’s employees, highlighting that Ellison had needed to adjust quickly after being hired as director of operations in late 2019.
“They were able to pivot, change the floor on multiple occasions. We used to sell maybe 100 banners a year, and then we were selling 200 banners a day, and you had to set the floor up in a different way to flow, and they were able to pivot with that,” Black said. “It was just an exceptional team win.”
Among the changes the production team needed to learn was how to create 4,500 new products on the fly with increased demand. Ellison said NMC was 92% above its normal revenue in June, and at times it was getting orders that were 200 to 300 times the size of an average order.
“We didn’t have time to think. We had time to make product and to shed product,” Ellison said.
With the growth in 2020, Ellison said NMC is working on how to keep its momentum going as the pandemic begins to wind down. The response team still meets twice a day to talk about the market, changes and the projects they’ve been working on.
“Coming out of this, there’s going to be a greater need for products that don’t exist today, as people try to return to work, as people try to get back to normal,” Ellison said.
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