Elite Elastomers finds its niche in rubber industry

RIPLEY, Miss.—After spending more than 15 years in the rubber industry, Steve Glidewell came to a point in his life and career in the early 2000s where he got the entrepreneurial urge.

He had worked for Dana Inc. from 1986 to 2002 and he wanted to start his own company. "I like to tell people I reached that magic age of 39 where I was still stupid enough to start a company," Glidewell said. "I feel if I had waited too much longer I probably wouldn't have had the guts to do that."

So he formed Elite Elastomers Inc. and things have grown from there. Fast forward to 2019, and Elite Elastomers boasts four buildings at its headquarters site in Ripley. That includes the main mixing facility, along with a warehouse for raw materials, as Elite's main business is as a custom mixer focusing on higher-end compounds. Adjacent to that is a standalone research and development center, and two separate plants (only one that currently is being used) for the Engineered Products business established in 2016.

In addition, last fall's purchase of Wayne County Rubber brought Elite Elastomers a second mixing location in Wooster, Ohio. The operation was renamed Elite Elastomers of Ohio.

All told, Elite employs 50 in Ripley and another 20 in Ohio.

Coming home

It took Glidewell a bit of time deciding where to locate Elite after the company was incorporated. He had worked about a decade in Paragould, Ark., at what was then Dana's Industrial Products Division. He liked the area and there were people wanting to help him get started, but there wasn't much economic support to be had.

He then looked at Tennessee before deciding on coming back to his original home in Ripley.

"It just happened to hit at a good time, the hometown boy coming back," said Glidewell, who serves as Elite Elastomers president. "The big thing there is furniture and they were looking to diversify their manufacturing base. It ended up being a financial decision for us because they helped us quite a bit."

Elite broke ground in December 2001 on a greenfield operation. "We didn't buy a building," he said. "We poured the concrete, put up the buildings and ordered the equipment."

It was late 2002 before the mixing operation was production-capable. As the team tried to build up a business, Elite first got caught up in the economic downturn that followed the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

But the slowdown actually worked to the firm's advantage a bit, according to Glidewell. "I was always on the opposite side of that in technical," he said. "When things were running really fast and furious in the plant, you were rarely given any production time to run trials."

With the business of potential customers slow, Elite was given some opportunities as the new kid on the block. "Some we knew from past relationships," he said, "and we were fortunate enough to start building our business."

Elite started with one mixing line, added a second in 2004 and a third two years after that. It primarily deals with higher-end compounds such as HNBR.

"But it's like any other business," Glidewell said. "You have to keep the lights on and you have to pay the bills, so you have to take some more commercial-like business. We ran quite a few FDA-approved ingredient types with EPDM and SBRs. It was a little bit less margins, but it was business. We managed to start filling up our mixers."

Defining its business model

In 2006, Glidewell wanted Elite Elastomers to focus on growing its business in the oil and gas sector, mixing some FKM and HNBR compounds. But he found it tough to get past the buyers, until one day he came to a realization.

"If you're not one of the boys, you've got to hire one," he said. So Glidewell hired the now-retired Paul Guess, who had a track record with Colonial Rubber and was known to customers in the oil and gas sector.

"It wasn't anytime at all that we had opportunities to submit samples," the Elite president said. "We really have made that particular market segment the one we spend a lot of our time in and really a lot of our innovation capital to develop new products for those grades."

After that—sometime between 2009 and 2010—Glidewell said Elite wanted to define its identity and business model in the market. He knew the mixer wasn't a big player in terms of volume, so that wasn't the right path. But where it excelled was in developing material compounds.

"We understand that, and our approach is application-oriented," he said. "I'm a chemical engineer, so I look at things from an engineer's perspective as well as a chemistry perspective when we design."

So Elite made a concerted effort to make that part of its sales process. "If you want something that's an optimal material for you, you need to talk to someone who understands how you're going to be using your product," Glidewell said.

Ginger Glidewell, technical director of Elite Elastomers and Steve's wife, said the compounder excels in the development of intellectual property that is unique to the market.

"We like to ask the customers what it is they want to do in the marketplace that maybe they're not doing at this point," she said. "If you want to be No. 1 in a particular application, we would love to partner with you. We push customers to the forefront of the application so they're No. 1 and we're the support bank."

Another opportunity is where customers may have technical talent retiring, Elite can serve as an extension of the technical units inside some of these groups. "We sit in on engineering, design and development meetings jointly, which when I first started in this career, that was unheard of," she said.

With many of the projects the firm has been involved in, it has been on a "by invitation" basis, Ginger Glidewell said.

"We've been identified as a group that can handle intellectual discussions and property in a fashion that is comfortable moving forward being an outsider to the company we're talking with," she said. "It's very nice to have that reputation with our customer base."

Steve Glidewell said Elite is all about building things, from how it designs materials that don't exist to building businesses. "That's part of that American experience in doing something constructive, and leaving where you've been a little better off," he said.

In 2016, the company formed Elite Engineered Products L.L.C., which the firm said allows it to "couple its cutting edge ability to develop non-metallic materials with its extensive knowledge of the manufacture of the products made from those materials."

It has 50,000 total square feet of space in two plants in Ripley, though Steve Glidewell said currently only the 35,000-sq.-ft. plant is being utilized. He said EEP was set up to manufacture completion tools for the fracturing process in the oil exploration market along with sub-sea insulation and infrastructure products.

Elite has a portfolio of swellable elastomers that are used in the completion of fracking wells. It boasts both water and oil swell packers.

The company treads carefully to make sure EEP doesn't compete with customers it's supplying material to. There is one mixing and calendering customer, however, that makes a similar product with its own compound, and Steve Glidewell said they met and made full disclosure with the customer.

"They've been in and visited us, and they trust us completely," he said. "That's the level we want to work with from an integrity standpoint, that they're willing to know that we have another product that we provide in general to the industry. ... It actually competes with them, but they still want to buy from us and do business with us."

For that customer, he said the bottom line was this: "You provide good product. You're focused on us as a customer. If you're not putting my compound on your packer, it doesn't bother me."

Elite started EEG just as the oil and gas market was entering its recent downturn, but the market is coming back and Steve Glidewell said his firm has seen more activity for the packers.

The goods are sold through distributors, and he said EEP has plenty of capacity to ramp up production as sales grow.

Future plans

Ginger Glidewell said Elite is in a strong position to control the rate at which it moves forward. "We feel that we are responding to a market request for another choice or option, and logistically we needed to be positioned for that," she said.

The firm deploys what it calls an "improvement footprint," aimed at targeting projects to move operations forward in existing facilities. It will execute that program at the former Wayne County Rubber facility in Ohio.

Steve Glidewell said a dedicated color line will be added to the Ripley mixing facility in the near-term.

Ginger Glidewell added that some customers now purchase non-critical color compounds from Elite, but these same customers also have a need for materials to fill color-critical applications.

"It will certainly service our existing customer base, and then provide opportunity to those who have reached out to us that we're unable to offer in that line right now."

The two said also on the wish list is new products in the sustainable markets. There has been active lab work on a new generation of compounds in this area, Ginger Glidewell said.

"It's a giant kitchen, but we just call it a lab," she said. "Our group has a good time. Being small, we have an advantage as far as our turnaround time from development to prototype to commercialization. We can get there pretty quickly with that dedicated facility."