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By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
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Jim and Rose Arnold of Grand Haven-based GLASSource attributed much of the company’s success with listening to their clients and being willing to take risks and expand, even in the midst of a tough economy. PHOTO: JOE BOOMGAARD

GRAND HAVEN — While the homebuilding market may be in an extended state of stagnation thanks to a combination of factors like the housing bubble and the recession, one local glass products manufacturer has found that home-owners have continued to invest in their homes.

Existing homeowners who feel they can’t sell their homes given the market seem to be willing to do remodeling projects, said Jim Arnold, president of GLASSource in Grand Haven. That has people interested in his company’s line of glass and mirror products.

The company’s signature product is a frameless glass shower door, which it supplies to retailers across Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, Indiana, Illinois and parts of Ohio.

GLASSource doesn’t make glass, but it purchases glass by the sheet from domestic sources and then cuts, grinds and otherwise fabricates products from those sheets.

Going into the recession, the company invested in new equipment, including a new tempering line, in response to customer demand and to bring quality control in-house. GLASSource had relied on outside vendors for tempering, but it was tough to find product with consistent quality. Moreover, as the products increasingly went to frameless designs, the company didn’t need to dedicate as much space to aluminum extrusions as it had in the past, he said.

“It was scary going into 2009 because we had just made a big investment, and we didn’t know what to expect,” Arnold told MiBiz. “We thought it would be better to produce (tempered glass) for ourselves so we could control the quality.”

The 25-year-old manufacturing company makes custom products — “We don’t do simple stuff — it’s all highly machined and highly complex,” he said — for inside the building envelope, including mirrored closet and cabinet doors. Arnold said GLASSource has long served the office furniture industry, a market that seems to be coming back after declining for years. The company makes glass doors for offices, as well as supplies glass for office wall systems and privacy panels.

“One of our big markets is the office furniture OEMs. They had receded and had bought offshore, but the cost has equalized. And with (short) lead times — and because they don’t want inventory on their shelves — they need custom vendors. They can’t wait 12 to 18 weeks,” he said. The commercial products are also increasingly customized. As a result, GLASSource offers various customization options for the glass products, like etched logos, printing and photos.

Another growing market as of late, particularly for the healthcare market, is for glass whiteboards, which can be erased easier than traditional whiteboards and are more sanitary because they don’t hold any marker residue, Arnold said.

GLASSource started as a short-order wholesaler out of necessity to supply a retail company Arnold and his wife, Rose, own in Grand Haven. “We saw companies needed these products and there was nowhere to get them, so we invested in the aluminum extrusion and the technology to build them,” he said, referring to the glass shower doors.

In 1991, the company moved to its current location adjacent to the Grand Haven airport as well as added glass-cutting and grinding capabilities. Over time, Rose Arnold, VP at GLASSource, said the company added more and more glass products that were not available locally, which led to a tripling in size in 1996, mostly to accommodate demand for the custom aluminum and glass shower door products. The tempering line was added in a 2007 expansion as the demand shifted to frameless designs, thus the need for more dedicated space to working with glass. About 90 percent of GLASSource’s business, outside of mirrors, uses tempered glass.

“There are not many people in Michigan that do tempered glass, and that puts us in a position to do problem orders. When people have problem orders, they’re usually contacting us,” Jim Arnold said. “And frankly, we were unable to take on more work because we didn’t have the capacity, but we do now that we (have the new line) up and running.”

Tempering sheets of glass is an energy-intensive process, which involves heating glass nearly to its melting point and then cooling it rapidly with a blast of air. The cooling process uses the most energy, he said, noting the company’s machines ramp up slowly to avoid expensive energy spikes.

The company has grown to employ 44 people over two shifts, and it is in the midst of yet another expansion to add machining capabilities so it will be able to handle more custom work and improve product turnaround. The four new machines will increase GLASSource’s high-end CNC machining capacity.

“In the recession, (business for some of our customers) crashed, and it dropped for us, too, but we picked up in other areas,” Jim Arnold said. “My concern was, as it comes back, that we might not be able to meet the expectations of our customers, but we can now.”

The company has also added various products, including glass tables, machined or stylized door glass and glass handrails. It also licensed a technology, Glassguard, that permanently changes the surface of glass products with a water-repelling nanotechnology so cleaning becomes much easier, Rose Arnold said.

“The key to GLASSource is we can do whatever you want. Customers tell us what they want and we can do it,” said Josh Leonard, regional sales manager at GLASSource.

Installing the new machinery also brings another set of challenges, in that it can be difficult to find qualified CNC machinists who can also understand CNC programming. Unlike CNC machining in the automotive industry where a plant is producing thousands of pieces of a single part, the machining at GLASSource changes by the order, hence the need for well-rounded CNC employees.

“It’s not a large industry, so we always have to train people,” Jim Arnold said.