Made to order: Premier succeeds in custom niche of hose sector

SAN DIEGO—There's a simple reason Premier Industrial Hose Manufacturing Ltd. doesn't have a catalog of all the goods it produces.

It's because as a maker of specialty hoses, virtually everything the Granby, Quebec-based firm produces is made to order. Everything that is a bit out of the ordinary, according to Vice President Marco Giusti.

"We were born to do whatever the others don't, or don't like to do. Odd sizes, odd hoses," he told Rubber News. "Anything that is custom made or custom built.

"In the old days our founders used to say, 'Big or small, we make them all.' "

Premier Industrial does put out some product sheets and brochures, along with information on its website, but that's about as much detail as it gets into when it comes to the firm's hose offerings.

The company makes hoses in a range of sizes, from three-eighths-inch to 40-inch inside diameter, and as long as 50 feet, and small production runs aren't a problem. The firm works with certified Canadian and U.S. custom mixers to formulate the correct material, and the hoses can have value-added extras such as custom color and special ends.

Most of its hoses are sold to distributors who also source from the big U.S. hose manufacturers or major importers, and they come to Premier for anything that's not offered by their larger vendors.

"Do we have a catalog? No. We make everything that's not in catalogs," Giusti said.

Scott Harrington, technical sales and development manager, said the entire breadth of the Canadian firm's portfolio is hard to fathom.

And he should know, as he's been there since Premier was founded in 1994. In fact, Harrington is in the system as "Employee No. 1."

"We literally have over a hundred thousand specs in our system," Harrington said. "You can't catalog a hundred thousand specs."

That covers all the specification since Premier started. For certain products, the hose developers at the firm can use a past spec, if it's a general type of hose. But there are other specs that are client-specific, and can't be re-used for other customers.

"At least we have the knowledge, because then when somebody calls to develop a hose we can go in our database. It's all computerized," Giusti said. "We can look at examples of what we did. And then we can design a new custom specific hose, but starting from examples of things that we did in the past and it worked out. Now history helps."

Premier Industrial Hose was founded July 28, 1994, by Tom McCarthy, Rey Tremblay and Danilo Tissino, three men with more than 100 years of experience in the business and all of whom dreamed of competing in the niche market of specialty hoses.

Giusti's father, Francesco, joined the firm in 1999, when one of the founders was looking to retire. Francesco Giusti had a long history in the hose industry, both in Canada and his home country of Italy.

In the 1970s, he worked for IVG, an Italian producer of hose. The company opened a plant in Canada in the late 1970s, and Francesco and his wife moved there right after their wedding so he could work at the facility as a chemist. Marco and his sister, Eloisa Giusti, were born while the couple lived in Canada.

A few years later, Goodyear bought the factory and the elder Giusti stayed on (the plant currently is part of ContiTech).

After 10 years in Canada, Francesco took the opportunity to go back to Italy to manage a large Alfagomma hose factory. The family lived in Italy from 1987-99 until a vacation to visit relatives in Canada changed the course of their lives once again.

While there, his father visited his friend who had opened up a little hose shop in Granby.

The friend ended up being on vacation, but one of the other partners said he remembered Francesco from the old IVG days, and asked him out for lunch. That partner had helped found Premier as a "pre-retirement project," and was looking to sell his share of the specialty hose firm. So a few months later, the Giusti clan moved back across the pond to Canada.

In the meantime, Marco finished engineering school in December 2004 and joined the company a month later. He started in technical sales, working with Tremblay, the founder who handled sales and designed the hoses.

"I learned over the years all of the tricks of designing hoses and quoting, and developing systems to quickly quote specialty hose," Marco Giusti said. "That was my main job and eventually I moved into more other management things."

Over the course of several years, Tremblay and the third founder both retired, and the Giusti family bought their shares.

In 2008, Premier became a true family-owned firm. Francesco, now 75, continues as president, though not in a day-to-day supervisory role. That is left to Marco.

Eloisa now heads up purchasing. And Marco's brother-in-law, Mathieu Brisebois, serves as production manager and is involved in the in-house development of the production machinery.

But while the Giusti family owns the company, Premier really is an extended family.

Just this past year, Marco said they had several employees celebrating 20th or 25th anniversaries.

And then there's Harrington, who's been there since the start. He's stayed because of the variety of the work and the camaraderie of the staff, which sits right around 50 employees.

He started in hose production and, because of his mechanical knowledge, moved into building equipment and tooling to meet the firm's productions needs. Now, for the past five years, he moved into his new role in hose design and development manager.

"Just because it's custom work, it's never the same thing," Harrington said. "Every day is something new. New challenges. I'm a person who can't do something that's repetitious. I still have a hand in helping with designing the machines and tooling. If there's a problem in production, I'm the one who will help them solve the problem.

"... It's never gotten boring. It's never gotten monotonous because it's constantly evolving, which is exactly what I like."

As far as the staff dynamic, Harrington said everyone is close because they've known each other for so long. "They're not just co-workers, they're your friends and family now," he told Rubber News. "Something happens in their personal life and we're worried for them. You want to help them through it. Some say where they work, it's like a family. Here it is a family.

Speaking of family, the two people driving sales into the U.S.—John Jeffreys and Katlyn Ricciardo—are a father and daughter duo. And neither of them had any background selling hose.

Jeffreys worked in procurement during a 42-year career at Avon Lake, Ohio-based Watteredge L.L.C., and was a customer of Premier's. In this position, he got to visit the factory in Granby a number of times and developed a solid relationship with the team, particularly when Marco Giusti came on board.

So when Jeffreys looked to retire from Watteredge, he contacted the Premier vice president to see if he could help them grow sales of what he saw firsthand as a top-notch product into the U.S.

"I had intimate knowledge that they didn't have anybody here who really was selling their products for them," Jeffreys said. "I felt if we could make something work, it was a really good fit because of my relationship with them."

So he joined Premier in January 2017 as U.S. sales manager. Being that it was a "retirement job," he knew someday he might actually retire—that hasn't happened yet—so he started putting the bug into his daughter's ear about joining him at the hose firm.

Ricciardo has an even less likely background for someone looking for a job of sales and marketing for a custom hose manufacturer. She was a teacher for 10 years working in special education, mainly in private schools with students with severe autism.

"What I did I loved, but there's a lot of politics involved in education," she said. "If I could have just loved my kids, and taught my kids, and just done that, I think I'd still be there.

"But things don't always go all that well in the education system. And it hurt my heart to see them not get what I thought they deserved."

She thinks her father could tell that perhaps her heart was a little too big to stay in education. She had heard him rave about Premier for many years and talk about what great people they are.

After talking it over with her dad for more than a year, Ricciardo decided she could step away from teaching and join Jeffreys at Premier.

And when she did—in March 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic shut things down—she saw why her dad was so happy.

"The one thing that really struck me when I got to go up to the factory and meet the guys in the plant, is that they're excited to show me what they're doing and what they're building, and why they're doing it," Ricciardo said. "From top to bottom, they're just so proud of the product that we put out, which I think is really cool and sets us apart in a way."

Ricciardo pushed for Premier to become active in NAHAD, including exhibiting at the association for hose distributors and manufacturers, including this year at the group's annual convention in San Diego. Her first goal was to bring about name recognition, and she believes they've succeeded.

"Otherwise I truly believe that we do have the best products, so I think my goal was why in the world aren't these distributors giving their customers the best products," she said at the convention. "If I truly believe that, why am I not offering that to the masses in a way?

"That was my main goal. We're working toward it. I think we're getting there."

Giusti was surprised when he came to NAHAD and found out how many potential customers knew who Premier Industrial was. Being so busy in their daily work lives, the officials from Granby don't get out as much as they'd like.

"You come to NAHAD, you see your clients from Montreal, your clients from Ohio, your clients from Arkansas. They're all here at the same time," the company vice president said. "It's three intense days, but you see this whole community together, even others from Italy.

"You realize, you're part of something big. Something that our families still maybe don't understand what we do when we talk about rubber hose."

The efforts in the U.S. are paying off, as Giusti said a little more than 60 percent of revenues now come from the U.S., with most of the rest throughout Canada. The vast majority is sold through distribution, though Premier does have some long-term OEM clients with so many specific needs that change daily that they need to work directly with the manufacturer.

And though they don't actively sell internationally, some of their products do end up overseas, mostly from distributors exporting products.

"We have a couple long-term customers doing projects in Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands and elsewhere," Harrington said. "A lot of our hoses are going to Europe, the Far East and South Africa. We're not selling them there, but our hoses are ending up there."

Premier Industrial makes mandrel-built hose for a wide variety of industries. From chemical, petroleum and food to mining, abrasion-resistant hoses are a big part of what the firm makes. Anything involving high temperatures, such as in steel mills, also falls within the Canadian firm's expertise.

The Montreal area also has a large concentration of circuses—including Cirque du Soleil—and Premier developed a Chinese climbing pole that has gained a following within this niche.

"That all started with one customer coming in and saying 'I want this,' " Harrington said. "And I said, 'That's not what you want. This is what you want.' Now we've done thousands, and shipped them all over the world."

But while Premier makes its way through producing what others won't, the quality is top notch, Giusti said, including built-in fittings.

That includes advanced computerization of products, he added, with a programmer coming in weekly to add features to its in-house ERP system.

Typically distributors will contact them with their special needs, and Premier takes it from there.

"Unless it's a distributor who's really specialized in custom hoses, often they don't know exactly what they need," Giusti said. "We start asking questions. We look at the request, then we ask more technical questions to help the distributors ask the right questions, or know what they need to look at. Then we do our technical quote and design the hose."

Premier makes effective use of cobots in designing its production lines to lessen the physical effort required by the hose makers.

"Our goal now for the next couple of years is to keep upgrading," he said. "We've worked on several production lines. Now we have a big line to upgrade, and that's our project over the next year."

As the whole team prepares to mark Premier's 30th anniversary with a gala celebration, the hose maker still operates at the same facility where it all started. The firm has expanded over the years, with the factory now a little more than 40,000 square feet, with land to grow.

Without releasing company sales, Premier has been in a growth mode ever since its founding, according to Giusti. Revenues even remained stable during the Great Recession of 2008.

COVID-19 brought strong growth, with 50 letters submitted from customers within the first three weeks that stated the hose maker was an essential supplier and needed to stay open.

And Premier officials continue to follow a philosophy started by the founders: If a project potentially is good for the future of Premier, then they will support it.

"We've had this culture about investing and never saying no," Giusti said. "And we keep doing it."