OHIO HOMEGROWN

Ohio has an exceptionally large number of entrepreneurial companies in many fields. Site Selection has chronicled the growth of such start-ups as apparel embroider 5Bs and basket-maker Longaberger Co., whose sales now top the billion dollar mark. We've talked about distribution firms that began with a single truck and now encompass many lines, or salad makers that started out as fruit stands and now serve clients in multiple states.

Ohio's engineered materials industries have much of the same entrepreneurial spirit. Here are a few examples of little beginnings grown big. Each never got too big for its small-town britches, and in fact, many of the multinational firms have put small town Ohio on the map.

Rubbermaid: From Wooster to the World

Founded by five entrepreneurs as the Wooster Rubber Co. in 1920, the firm first manufactured toy balloons, branching out into Rubbermaid housewares in the 1930s. When the U.S. government froze civilian use of rubber during WWII, Wooster Rubber Co. survived by producing self-sealing fuel tanks and life jackets for the U.S. defense effort. By the mid-1950s the company had started making plastic houseware products under the Rubbermaid name, partly as a result of the synthetic rubber chemistry advances made during the war and thereafter.

Today Rubbermaid is the second largest plastics product company in the U.S., chalking up sales of $2.3 billion in 1995.

Rubbermaid directs its worldwide operations from Wooster, a micropolitan community of 22,500 in North Central Ohio. The company's commitment to the city's quality of life is large. Among many generosities, it has contributed to the college town's nationally recognized Wayne Center for the Arts and built a popular Rubbermaid Store to support the economic vitality of the downtown area. The store is highly successful as a retail venture, but more importantly for Wooster, it draws 450,000 shoppers a year to the town.

Step 2: Play It Again, Tom

Entrepreneurs are a special breed -- risk-takers, idea engines and passionate dreamers. Few succeed even once. Tom Murdough, CEO of Step 2 Corp., has done it twice.

Starting with nine employees in 1970, Murdough built his Little Tikes Co. into the world's largest rotational molder, eventually employing 1,500. He later sold that company to Rubbermaid. He formed Step 2 in 1991 and, in just four years, parlayed his experience in rotational-molded plastics into multimillion dollar a year business employing nearly 3,000 in rural communities in Northeast Ohio. "We believe almost anything can be done better the second time around," says Murdough. "The mission of Step 2 is to go a step beyond what's been done before."

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Step 2 makes easy-to-assemble children's products, as well as gadgets for the gardening market, mail boxes and picnic tables. The rotationally molded products are retailed throughout the U.S., Canada and 60 other countries.

Roppe Corp.: Walk on Me -- Please

Roppe Corp., based in the micropolitan community of Fostoria (pop. 15,000), is the nation's leading maker of rubber flooring and baseboards, controlling 60-70 percent of the rubber baseboard business in the U.S. President and CEO Don Miller started with the company when he was 21 and the firm had 27 employees. Now there are more than 500 in the Fostoria plant and warehouse, a vinyl plant in Florida and a hardwood molding plant, also in Fostoria. Annual sales have topped $60 million.

So far, this is just a story of a company that made it big with a pedestrian product. Now enter Miller's management style. He devised an incentive-based, highly effective goal system that rewards team productivity. He not only lets the teams go home early if they reach their production goals, but also shares the increased profits with his employees -- they usually bag around $8,000 in bonuses each year.

Miller's management style and contributions to the quality of life in Northwest Ohio have earned him a long list of accolades, including Entrepreneur of the Year and Executive of the Year. He was a 1994 winner in the American Business Achievement Awards for displaying characteristics of "what a business should be."

Owens Corning: Lucky Accident

A fortuitous accident gave the world fiberglass. Scientists, trying to fuse two glass blocks together, goofed and produced glass strands instead. Seeing the commercial possibilities, Corning Glass and Owens-Illinois formed a joint venture which spun off as Owens-Corning in 1938.

The first research and manufacturing facility was in Newark (Licking County), thus launching Central Ohio as the birthplace of the fiberglass industry.

Directing global operations from a new $100 million headquarters in Toledo, Owens-Corning built itself into the world's largest producer of such building products as insulation, shingles and windows, and of glass composited with plastic for use in autos, boats, skis, golf carts, tennis rackets, pipes and telephone poles.

A 550-acre campus in Granville (also in Licking County) is the epicenter of global R&D for Owens-Corning. Here, the company recently developed Miraflex, the first new type of glass fiber in nearly 60 years. Composed of two forms of glass fused into one filament, the fiber is intended to be a formidable competitor to polymers and synthetic fibers because of such added-value properties as fire, smoke and chemical resistance and increased tensile strength.

Kent Display Systems: Thin Is Chic

In the not-too-distant future, your daily newspaper will come in a paper-thin electronic version, with more color and higher resolution than the paper edition. You'll capture the news on a cellular device requiring no plug-in. You'll download your favorite paper from your cable system, touch a headline on the screen and, presto, you're reading the front page.

That's just one product on the horizon resulting from the marriage of research at Kent State University's Liquid Crystal Institute with the sales savvy of Kent Display Systems (KDS), which is bringing flat-panel technology to the marketplace.

Based in Kent in Northeast Ohio's Portage County, KDS mixes the molecules to allow colored light to be directly reflected by a cholosteric liquid crystal. Low or no power use is one of the main benefits, meaning that displays can be put in places where power is not available, such as aisles of retail shops. Applications include point-of-purchase displays, marquees, rail and flight information, pagers and mobile phones. Displays, which are brilliant even in sunlight, can be made on plastic, with about half the weight of glass.

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