Maine firms take world stage with little-known, everyday products that rack up millions in sales

When Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 went missing on March 8, it didn't take long for aviation experts to suspect that lithium ion batteries in the cargo hold may have caught fire. While the plane's whereabouts remain unknown, as does the cause of its disappearance, the focus on containing potential fires on aircraft remains high, and has opened the door for a Maine company to develop a lightweight, flame-retardant material for airline containers.

“For several years there have been discussions about the issues related to lithium batteries, and we recognized in advance where the industry was heading on potential regulations,” says Jeff Laniewski, executive director of research and product development at Tex Tech Industries Inc., of talks with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. “Our engineers looked to improve and modify the design of existing unit load devices [cargo containers] to incorporate fire-retardant, strength and reduced-weight characteristics.” The FAA has listed 141 air incidents covering 39 pages of its website and involving batteries in cargo and baggage on passenger and cargo planes — in electronic devices like MP3 players, digital cameras and reading devices — from March 1991 to February 2014. The company's cargo container covers are now in the prototype stage, and it is talking with customers and a manufacturer to fabricate them. “We've taken the ballistic material and impregnated it with a resin to make it fire resistant, stronger and lighter,” adds Laniewski, who says containers built using the material are 45% lighter than traditional aluminum containers, and also help save fuel costs for the airlines.

The high-tech material is just one of the newer items made by the Portland-based company, which sells 7,000 different products. Tex Tech claims to make 75% of the world's tennis ball felt, and it has produced more than three million yards of aircraft seat fire-blocking material, as well as protective vests for police and soldiers. With 320 employees worldwide — 185 of them in Maine — Tex Tech still isn't a household name. That's because less than $1 million of its $63 million in worldwide revenues comes from sales to local customers.

And it's not the only Maine company quietly hiring, growing and making millions of dollars in global markets with everyday products that are pervasive, yet infrequently known to Mainers. KICTeam Inc., an Auburn-based maker of private-label, disposable cleaning products for everything from baggage and shipping label printers to ATMs and credit-card readers, employs 60 to 80 mostly full-time workers. It pulled in more than $10 million in revenues in 2013, less than $100,000 of that from customers in Maine. Add to that Wentworth Technology Inc., a Saco-based company with 20 employees and revenues of $1.3 million, which President and CEO Richard Hale expects will more than double to $3 million this year. Less than 5% of the company's sales are in Maine. Hale says Wentworth essentially made a better mousetrap in its flexible, noise-cancellation headphones currently used by drive-up window workers at fast food retailers including Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's.

They're just three local companies that have carved out niches using Yankee ingenuity to figure out what customers need, and will keep needing, as backbone pieces of their businesses. “Mainers are very independent people, they're very proud people, and they're practical. These are all wonderful attributes for innovators,” says Hale, a Maine “import” who previously worked at companies in Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Massachusetts. Hale, 72, has twice come out of retirement, once to run Rollingford, New Hampshire-based company,VXI, which made headsets for voice recognition, and the second time to start Wentworth after prompting from former VXI colleagues.

“So I started an electronics company at age 72. Sanity is overrated,” says Hale, who also enjoys racing Lightning sailboats with his children, a passion that brought him to Portland.

Swiping clean

Peter Klein, CEO and president of KICTeam, exemplifies the practicality that Hale cites as a key to innovation. KICTeam emerged after custom contractor Enesco USA Inc., also of Auburn, bought KIC Products (for keep it clean) in 2004, and then merged it with a San Diego-based competitor in 2007.

While the initial company, KIC Products, had good name recognition, it couldn't get business with Japan Cash Machine, which at the time manufactured 80% of the devices that took money from people, such as gaming and bank machines. Klein explains that JCM opened up its machines to clean them rather than using flat cards impregnated with cleaner like the ones KIC Products made.

“I asked them why they didn't use cleaning cards, and they said their machines had sensors inside that were recessed, so they couldn't be cleaned with a flat card,” Klein says. “So I asked if we had a card that could clean recessed lenses, would he buy it, and he said, 'yes.'”

Klein returned to his office and consulted with Glen Bailey, his vice president of product development, who Klein says has a very creative mind.

“The next day he came into my office with a piece of paper, folded it in half, and tore two [small perpendicular] lines in the middle of it,” Klein told Mainebiz, as he demonstrated the process. When the piece of paper is opened up, the torn center turns into a slightly raised area that Klein says can clean the recessed areas of machines made by JCM and others. That's how the company's patented Waffletechnology card cleaner originated. It is resold by the company's clients, which put their own brands on it and then resell it to customers. The cards have a plastic core with fabric over it and one of the company's 15 EnVanish brand wet cleaners soaked into it.

“We really are an undercover company,” says Klein. When KIC Products was merged with Clean Team, the San Diego-based flat cleaning card competitor, the combined company was renamed KICTeam, taking parts of each of their former names. The name KICTeam only recently was put onto the company's doors at its Auburn plant, replacing the parent Enesco's name.

The company now makes more than five dozen products with 400 different SKUs, including flat and waffled products, and most are custom-made. It sells about 30 million cards and wipes annually, Klein says, including to the New York City transit system (turnstile swipes), Las Vegas casinos (money and slot machines), post offices and retailers. The cards typically can be used only once, and then tossed. “It's a razor-blade business,” says Klein. The cards run from 50 cents to $1.50 a piece retail. KICTeam has sales offices in Australia, China, Europe, Canada and elsewhere.

“We're one of the few companies that can claim our product is used in every country in the world,” he says, adding that Federal Express uses its cleaners for the labels it prints. “We make everything in Maine for the world, but our revenues inside Maine are very small. The company isn't known in the L-A area.” He estimates, however, that if all existing electronic devices were cleaned once a month for 50 cents, his company would have $1.3 billion in revenues.

“We like it dirty,” says Klein, when asked about going into the recesses where others fear to tread to find dirt. Often, he says, a machine that appears to be broken merely needs to be cleaned. In other cases more is required, like the doughnut KICTeam found inside a broken printer from a doughnut shop.

The company currently has 85,000 square feet of space, which Klein says is starting to get tight. He's seeking options, but plans to keep the company in Auburn. That doesn't rule out international expansion, initially focused on Europe, but eventually on Japan. For now, KICTeam is producing marketing materials in eight languages.

Driving through

For Wentworth, communications are focused on a small area within a fast-food restaurant drive-through operation, from the ordering station to the people who fulfill the orders inside to the final payment and food dispersal windows.

People driving through in the comfort of their cars may not realize the noisy, hectic environment behind the scenes from the time they order their food until they pick it up. Hale explains that the food preparation areas can be hot, loud blenders and food processors often hum noisily, “fryolators” kick up grease and heat, and outside the serving window diesel trucks and cars make noise and smell.

Existing headphones, Hales says, tend to break and don't shield out noise, so it's difficult for staff to hear orders and communicate with each other.

“We had a lot of experience with noise cancellation at VXI,” says Hale of his former company, which makes headsets for Dragon voice recognition software and other customers. “We used more advanced algorithms for voice and a more robust voice communications system,” he says of the Wentworth SpeedThru system, which also uses a dual microphone. The two microphones each provide a signal separated by time, so one is used to cancel the noise of the other.

The system includes from two to nine battery-powered headsets and software in a base system priced from $3,000 to $6,000. Each headphone alone is $500, less than current models on the market, Hale says. The system can work within a 300-foot range without so-called repeaters to boost the sound. Instead of push buttons to control the volume — and where Hale says food and grease can get stuck in the recesses — the headsets have flat areas with touch volume controls. Wentworth also tested the system for ease-of-use.

“We gave it the grandmother test,” he says. “And we applied advanced technology to problems in a large market.” Good headsets can help save money, he adds, because workers aren't repeating orders and customers are getting served faster.

The headsets are bendable and made of medical-grade plastics, and have sturdy, coated stainless steel bands that run from the ear pieces across the top of the head. Customers include Dunkin' Donuts, which is its largest buyer, followed by Subway, which is beginning to add more drive-through facilities, he says.

The company plans to move to another facility in Saco in June. The current location, within the Yale Cordage office space in Saco, is too large at 9,000 square feet, he says, and the new space will have 5,000 square feet. The company also plans to add 3–5 more workers this year, up from the current 20.

Even though fast-food restaurants represent a $100 million-a-year market, growing at 6% annually for new products and at about 10% for retrofit or upgrade products, like any sailor Hale is casting his eyes toward the horizon. First, he plans to make Internet-based software upgrades available at some point in the future. And he plans to keep tapping the fast-food restaurant drive-through market, where 70% of buying is now occurring compared to walk-in traffic.

“But think of who else uses drive-through and needs confidentiality,” he says, noting his company has its eyes on banks, drug stores and others.

Tennis felt to ballistic vests

When it's not supplying the felt amateur and professional tennis players see on almost every ball they lob over the net, Tex Tech, which has factories in North Monmouth and Thailand and a weaving facility in Winthrop, is pushing the limits of protective and flame-resistant materials and filters that scrub air for coal-fired, cement and other plants.

Aerospace and transportation industries are big markets for the company, which counts Airbus, Bombardier and Sikorsky as clients. Tex Tech makes moisture- and fire-resistant materials that are used on seats and under rugs in airplanes as well as some trains, school buses and subways. It even has two workers focusing on fire-retardant materials for SpaceX, Laniewski says.

That's a long way from the predecessor company's humble beginnings in 1904 as an engineered textile mill that also at one point made baseball uniforms.

One recent focus is its Core Matrix Technology, a patented, protective material used in advanced ballistic vests worn by military and law enforcement. In the past, various fabric layers were quilt-stitched together, but Laniewski says the company added a patented process where it drives needles through each layer to push the fabric threads in three dimensions so that energy from a projectile like a bullet dissipates across all three. That, he says, reduces the “backface signature,” the pushback from a bullet's impact that can injure the wearer.

The company in April expanded its product portfolio by buying Chapman Innovations, a Salt Lake City maker of CarbonX non-flammable fabrics and apparel, for an undisclosed amount. Tex Tech itself just a few months earlier, in November 2012, was bought by Minneapolis venture capital company ShoreView Industries, in partnership with Tex Tech's senior management team, from another venture capital company, Yukon Partners.

While the CarbonX acquisition will help expand its products, Tex Tech also is developing its own advances, such as a photovoltaic textile that can generate electricity. Laniewski says it's in the development stage and is proven as a concept, but Tex Tech hopes to get more funding from the military to advance it.

“Soldiers carry a lot of batteries into battle,” says Laniewski. “This could lighten their load.”

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