Calibrating East Hampton
Sometimes, especially on cold days, a stop at the gas station becomes an excuse for a coffee break. It’s why plastic coffee urns remain a fairly common sight in most service plazas.
If you’ve seen them, you’ve probably never noticed the metal wire racks they sit in. Usually they’re black. Often they have a small sponge right below where the cups would be filled to catch any spills.
Well, many of those are made in East Hampton by JC Products.
The 55-year-old business specializes in building devices to display retail items such as the aforementioned urn-holders.
They have also built quite a few of the metal wire racks that are used to display newspapers around Connecticut. And many of the wire hangers used to display Stihl weed-whackers were made by JC Products, said Jeffrey Maier, the company president.
With 12 employees, JC Products would qualify as one of the larger manufacturers in this town of roughly 13,000.
The largest is a firm that makes a product most readers have probably seen, a product which has made Connecticut somewhat renowned: Dickinson’s Witch Hazel.
Witch hazel is a shrub whose extracts have medicinal and therapeutic properties. It’s been used for over 150 years, and most of the witch hazel sold worldwide is made by Dickinson Brands.
Dickinson is a conglomeration of four companies owned by Ed Jackowitz that manufactures and markets witch hazel-based products to nearly every retail, grocery and health store in the land.
The four companies are: American Distilling, which manufactures and bottles the witch hazel compounds; Dickinson’s, which markets skin care products to traditional retailers; T.N. Dickinson’s, which markets witch hazel-based skin products as an over-the-counter pharmaceutical; and Humphreys Pharmacal, which markets witch hazel-based products through health food stores.
The combined companies employ about 75 workers and operate out of a 55,000-square-foot factory complex on East High Street. In the coming year, the company will begin work on clearing a nearby 44-acre site where it plans to build a second, similarly sized complex to account for the growing demands for its products, Jackowitz said.
East Hampton is also home to a company that ensures hundreds of area manufacturers make widgets and devices that are built to specially-crafted sizes and shapes. MetriCal Laboratories is an 11-person company founded a decade ago by brothers Joseph and John Christian. It has a list of roughly 300 clients in and around Connecticut that depend on the firm to test and calibrate the gauges that manufacturers use to measure the widgets they make.
Most of MetriCal’s client firms are aerospace or automotive manufacturing companies, where close tolerances are, in many cases, mandated by law.
Many manufacturers rely on a firm like MetriCal because it’s cheaper to outsource the service it offers — which can be time-consuming during some periods, far less so during others and requires the creation of a massive audit trail that many small manufacturers would rather let another firm handle.
The brothers also take pride in the fact that such a service helps keep manufacturing costs down — and thereby keeps factories churning out goods in the Nutmeg State.
“We don’t want factories to go, so the way we see it, it’s our business to try and keep business in Connecticut,” Joseph Christian said. “And we do that by charging less for the service than we probably could, because we want our customers to come back the next year, and the next and the next.”
Ken St. Onge is a freelance writer and blogs about manufacturing at NutmegMachine.com.
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