BusinessTN

Fabric book coverings manufacturer, ICG/Holliston, has some catching up to do. The Kingsport-based company has established its worth as the preferred provider of the blue fabric covers on all U.S. passports for the past 14 years, spinning out enough material to make 12 million booklets annually.

It’s a healthy revenue stream, yet ICGH’s new management, led by incoming CEO Lawrence Maston, wants to move the 110-year-old facility into the digital age.

The former CEO of Los Angeles-based optical lighting maker, Wavien, Maston took the lead position last spring knowing manufacturers across the nation are taking a financial beating. ICGH once employed up to 450 people in its 350,000-square-foot plant, leading the cloth book coverings and traditional binding markets—until books started coming out in paperback.

“We apparently weren’t very awake,” Maston says. Demand for its flagship products declined and ICGH downsized to today’s 180 employees.

The remaining crew, averaging 27 years experience, is working on mid-20th century machinery. But Maston says some relatively inexpensive upgrades, such as installing new software, will pull ICGH’s output efficiency up to better compete in the ailing textiles arena. “I describe the business as ‘putting glob on cloth.’ The process is the same,” he says.

Tweaking existing operations is only step one in bringing the $30 million company into the modern age.

Maston doubled the company’s sales force to capture ICGH’s fair share of the emerging $20 million digital markets. The company’s product development lab has created a printable, HP-compatible cloth, so that photo album makers have the flexibility of using digital images and can make smaller, custom orders compared to paper-based covers.

The company also hopes to leverage its existing deal with cosmetics giant Estee Lauder to land more high-end, cloth-covered packaging contracts.

And, passport cover demand will increase beginning in November as travel to countries like Canada and Mexico will require a passport instead of a birth certificate. Maston expects a 10% to 20% revenue increase from the new federal mandate, plus the sales of fabric for passports in 40 other countries.

Gajanan Bhat, associate director of U.T.-Knoxville’s Textile and Nonwoven Development Center, says ICGH’s plans to offer customized products in smaller quantities makes more economic sense to suppliers rather than contracting overseas.

“The only [textile manufacturing] companies that are surviving are those who are supplying to niche or specialty markets. The key is to innovate and find these niche markets,” Bhat says. “Textiles are still doing better than most people think. [U.S. manufacturers] just need to believe that they can compete,” says Chuck Holland, CEO of Knoxville-based manufacturing consulting firm QualPro.

“Maston is determined to do more than just play catch up. Since joining ICGH, he’s pulled together $2 million in private investment, including some from his own pocket, to close the book on the company’s sleepy past.