Industrial Strength: Glitz And Glamour At Auburn's Industrial Park
"Back massages on company time!" the employee recruitment ads say. But, sorry to disappoint all those radio listeners, Masterman's is not glitzy. It's run from a nondescript 80,000-square-foot complex in the densely populated Auburn Industrial Park off Route 12.
Masterman's is down-to-earth, and the back massages, ping-pong table and on-site psychologist are not perks the company has tacked on to compete for employees with tech companies. They've been there for decades at the behest of company founder Ben Masterman.
The Masterman's story is a classic. Ben Masterman is a man of humble beginnings. He started the company about 46 years ago when he bought some first aid supplies and a list of names to sell them to. From there, he went about selling first aid products from the back of the family station wagon. It didn't take him long to find that first aid supplies and safety equipment go hand-in-hand. Today, the company is still family owned, and its 140 employees sell and distribute an enormous variety of industrial safety clothing, equipment and first aid supplies from Auburn.
According to company executives, many Masterman's employees are quite good at ping-pong (including Masterman himself who was a nationally recognized player in his youth) but it doesn't affect productivity. The company is growing, and almost always hiring.
Many of the business signs in the Auburn Industrial Park are rather plain in an old-school industrial park sort of way. The Masterman's sign is colorful, but perhaps the newest-looking sign is the large, ground-level, multicolored sign outside Kadant Web Systems.
Before The Internet?
It would be easy to assume that Kadant does something relative to computers or the Internet. But before the Internet, before computers, the term "web" was being used in the roots of oldest mass communication industry: papermaking.
Kadant Web Systems is a subsidiary of the multinational Kadant Inc. In Auburn, Kadant designs, engineers and manufactures doctor blades, blade holders and other equipment for the paper industry.
Kadant also makes tools paper mills need to adjust and maintain their blades, water boxes that house the chemicals paper mills use to treat paper and roll scrubbers that keep the steel rolls upon which paper is assembled clean.
And Kadant isn't the only blade-maker in the park. D&S Manufacturing/PDK Design and Grinding has been in the park for 35 years and its two dozen or so employees make industrial knives for the plastics injection molding industry.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments