Seeing Is Believing In Southbridge | Family firm carries on town's optics heritage
JP Mfg. Inc. is just the kind of place I like. It’s stuffed into what used to be a bakery in a 100-year-old building at 13 Lovely St. in Southbridge. And with a staff of just 22, it cranks out mountains of molded plastic lenses for a wide variety of uses.
On a recent tour through the facility with company COO Jan Kania, I got a sense for just how many products the family-owned company produces.
Practically from one place on the shop floor, Kania can grab a tiny plastic lens and mounting bracket used in high-tech medical equipment or something as simple as an ordinary magnifying glass.
Kania explained that the company makes many of its products for the education field, as well as the medical device industry and industrial components.
The optics industry is a challenging one. It’s a field in which American manufacturers come face to face with very stiff competition from Asian manufacturers. So, companies like JP have to be smart about what they make and who they offer it to.
Kania, who also teaches manufacturing and technology management at Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester, said finding a place for JP hasn’t always been easy.
Top Of The Market
“We try to keep ourselves near the top end of the market quality-wise, but we can produce a high quality product without the expensive costs,” he said. He said JP makes products that are perhaps just a step below those made by the high-end, high-price manufacturers.
So, their products are affordable for customers that want to buy a lot of them, but not super high volumes. When your kids are given an acrylic box with a magnifying top to put bugs in during science class, the box came from JP. When a manufacturer of surgical equipment needs a few thousand lenses the size of a drop of water for its machines, it calls JP.
JP found its place in the market by trial and error. The company was founded by Kania’s father, Albert Kania, and his uncle, Edmund Kuzdzol, who had worked at Southbridge-based optics giant American Optical.
The company grew through the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s by targeting very large customers, but when that market “evaporated” as those companies sought cheaper product from overseas, JP had to switch gears.
“Now we’ve tried to target smaller volume customers, companies with under 100 employees. We can do a very quick turnaround, and we try to remain as competitive as possible with overseas manufacturers,” Kania said.
In the United States, there’s very little competition for JP. American manufacturers tend to shoot for the very high end. With Asian companies concentrating on huge volumes, “it leaves the U.S. market very available. It leaves an opening so that we can still be around today,” Kania said.
Watch as Jan Kania, COO of JP Mfg. Inc. of Southbridge, explains one of the molded plastic lenses made by the company.
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