Confer Plastics was featured on the front page of Saturday's Tonawanda News. Here's the report...
Success stories in chamber award recipients
By Neale Gulley
The Tonawanda News
Sat Oct 30, 2010
The Chamber of Commerce of the Tonawandas has selected North Tonawanda’s Confer Plastics as the body’s annual Business of the Year. They will be honored at the chamber’s annual dinner Nov. 10 at Richard’s on Main restaurant and banquet facility, 561 Main Street, City of Tonawanda.
Confer Plastics, at 97 Witmer Road, was started in 1973 by Ray Confer at the Roblin Steel site before moving to its current home in 1986. Today the business is run by his son Doug and grandson Bob Confer and is even now adding jobs.
Bob Confer offered the News a tour of his massive 98,000 square foot factory packed with blow molding machines for a variety of goods — from wildly popular kayaks and sleds to kids toys, pool equipment and a massive number of other products sold at major retailers throughout the country and the world.
Eighteen members of the current workforce have remained with the firm for 18 years or more. While the company employed 110 machinists and other employees in April 2010, “next week we’ll be at 215,” Confer said.His grandfather Ray bought a farm in Gasport (where the family still resides) after returning from military service during World War II, and dabbled in plastic chemistry before working for a couple like firms before using his farm earnings to open the company that continues to see growth in North Tonawanda.
Throughout the 1960s, Ray engineered uses for plastic that are downright legendary and familiar to most people today, such as the “living hinge” that involves a simple piece of crimped plastic used on millions of tool boxes, instead of interlocking hinges.
Today the range of products the company produces and ships for clients seems boundless.
“Any idea people bring to us,” Confer said of the custom goods the company fabricates.
“One thing that helps us a lot is our ability to make very large pieces — out competitors can’t really do that,” he said describing two new machines the firm jumped to acquire.
Other factors contributing to the company’s success, he said, are the elimination of some competitors that didn’t fare well through the recession, and major companies vying for market share since the financial meltdown who are producing new products aggressively.
Two big contracts Confer is now producing are the molded kayaks sold in places like Dick’s Sporting Goods and a new children’s castle set based on Disney’s Rapunzel that breaks down into a pint-sized table and chairs for sale for sale at mega-retailer Target.
About 130,000 units have already been ordered.
The company that sells the kayaks expects to increase volume of that product as well.
Challenges to doing business, he said, rest largely in the cost of electricity, which Confer — whose weekly opinions can be found in a column that appears Tuesdays in the Tonawanda News — said is equivalent to two villages of Middleport. But his location near the biggest Canadian and U.S. markets is a major plus.
“I would say a lot of (our success) comes down to the know-how of the employees,” Confer said. “There’s the fact that we can make the large parts, but it’s also the intellect.”
Tickets and information about the chamber’s annual event are available by calling the chamber at 692-5120.
