Content area
Baltimore's Camden Yards and Ravens Stadium blend as comfortably into their urban landscape as the older structures around them, but much of their exterior beauty comes from the rural countryside of western Maryland. The brick for the major league baseball and football stadiums was made at Redland Brick Inc.'s Cushwa Plant in Williamsport, Md.
Full text
Baltimore's Camden Yards and Ravens Stadium blend as comfortably into their urban landscape as the older structures around them, but much of their exterior beauty comes from the rural countryside of western Maryland. The brick for the major league baseball and football stadiums was made at Redland Brick Inc.'s Cushwa Plant in Williamsport, Md.
Like most U.S. brick manufacturers, Redland's Cushwa plant is located near its raw materials: high grade clay with good ceramic properties and shale. Although shale is a sedimentary rock, it is formed from compressed mud and chemicals similar to clay so it is a common material for bricks..
The Cushwa plant has been producing bricks for over a century, and its 300 acres contain enough clay and shale for 100 more years. The brickyard was started in 1872 by Victor Cushwa and remained a family-owned business until 1987 when it was bought by a British company, Steetley PLC., which also owned two other American brick manufacturers, KF in Connecticut and Harmar, located near Pittsburgh.
In 1992, Steetley was acquired by Redland, PLC, another British company which at that time was the largest brick company in the world. The next year, all three American brick companies were consolidated into Redland Brick Inc. In 1996, Ohio-based Belden Brick Co. purchased Redland Brick Inc.
Today, Redland Brick Inc. has annual sales of $30 million and employs 240 people; 116 people work at the Cushwa plant. Redland's corporate office is in Williamsport, in a Williamsburg-style building built in 1973 of (what else!) brick. When a two-story addition was built last year, the new hand-moulded rose-colored bricks matched perfectly.
Redland Brick is one of over 100 American brick manufacturers. The U.S. has over 200 operational brick plants with an aggregate capacity of approximately nine billion standard brick equivalents. (Because of the varying sizes of bricks, capacity and production are measured in standard brick equivalents or SBEs, each measuring 7-5/8" x 3-5/8" x 2-1/4".)
Redland Brick Inc. has a annual capacity of 140 million SBEs: 57 million at the Cushwa plant, 54 million at the KF plant, and 29 million at the Harmar plant.
Approximately 90% of the bricks produced in the U. S. are extruded, 4 process in which stiff mud is forced through an adjustable opening.to form a long ribbon which is cut into bricks by rotating wires. Because the process can be highly automated, extruded bricks are less expensive to make. Redland's KF and Harmar plants produce extruded bricks and pavers.
The Cushwa plant, however, specializes in moulded bricks. "We're one of only a few companies in the country that make an authentic handmade brick," says James Vinke, president and CEO of Redland Brick. Between 3.5 and 4 million bricks are made each year at the Cushwa plant by workers pressing soft mud into sand-coated wooden moulds. The rest of the Cushwa plant's bricks are machine-moulded, which cost about 25% more than extruded bricks. Hand-moulded ones twice as much, but they are more varied in shape and texture than extruded bricks.
Today, additives can produce a wide spectrum of colors: Redland's Harmar and KF plants each have a core product line of 30 different colors; the Cushwa plant, 50 shades. Add the size and texture variations available and the number of brick choices today is immense. And along with bricks, Redland also produces architectural shapes for corners, arches, copings (caps on walls), sills, steps and cobblestone walks.
The cost of transportation, however, still means that most brick companies primarily market regionally. Redland Brick, which is one of the top, five manufacturers in the Northeast and! mid-Atlantic, in 1995 sold 70% of its production in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
That geographic limitation is changing, however, because of the uniqueness of the hand-and machinemoulded product lines at the Cushwa plant. "Moulded bricks have a different, a pleasing aesthetic. These are the only ones we ship great distances," says Vinke.
A $12 million investment several years ago to modernize the Cushwa plant greatly increased capacity so Vinke says the company strategy is to expand its marketing into other areas. Redland has been lining up distributors in the South, Southeast and Midwest, "distributors which have the type of organization to properly market this product which is for upscale, higher-value construction: homes and commercial buildings where people are willing to spend more for a distinctive facade. People are looking for more ways to differentiate what they build from everyone else."
Vinke says the best advertising is "the homes and buildings using our bricks." Redland also advertises in trade journals and upscale consumer magazines, attends trade shows, and distributes point-of-purchase display materials; the newest display promotes the hand-moulded bricks with an illustration of the Cushwa plant's production manager dressed as a colonial artisan.
The company Web site (www.redlandbrick.com) was designed as a quick reference for distributors and the architectural community. Vinke says the number of hits indicate the site's popularity as do customer comments. "They say they looked us up on the Web site."
From two-thirds to three-fourths of all bricks sold in the U.S. are for construction of single-family homes, which makes the brick industry vulnerable to economic downturns. "How you manage inventory is how you get through the cycles," says Vinke. During good times, he says, "with a good, wellrounded inventory, you ship more than you can produce. During slower times, you build up inventory, or slow or shut down the kiln to adjust inventory.
"Another thing to mitigate the downturn is having new proud: new colors, new textures. Currently, we're selling everything we can produce. Now is not a good time to introduce a new product."
With its plants setting production records, Redland Brick still found time to pursue ISO 9002 certification. "Belden Brick was one of the first North American brick companies to do it [ISO certification]. When they acquired us, they introduced us to ISO 9002," says Vinke.
"The process is meticulous. I don't think until you get into it, you can appreciate the demands of ISO. In most organizations, there are pockets of resistance, but our people really welcomed it. They didn't question why; they wanted to know why we weren't moving faster." Redland achieved its registration in "little over a year, record time!
"We had quality controls before, but not integrated quality protocols in the whole company. We saw ISO as an opportunity to give us protocols to improve our business."
Redland elected to have continuous ISO registration which requires independent audits every six months. "If you're involved [with ISO] for the right reasons-to improve, then the outside auditors are a tremendous discipline. We are one of the first in the industry to get ISO 9002; we certainly don't want to be one of the first to lose it."
Vinke says that ISO certification is commendable in the construction industry but the "amount of additional business [it brings] is not going to change the equation. ISO allows us to be a better company. This is a very improvement oriented business."
One recent improvement at Redland's Cushwa plant was the installation of robots, which Vinke says are relatively new in the U.S. brick industry. In many plants that use the extrusion method, automatic setting machines are used to move bricks from the dryer to the kiln cars. But the less regular edges of the Cushwa plant's moulded bricks have in the past required workers to move and stack bricks by hand. The robotic setting machines, however, can sense and adjust for the differing shapes. Vinke says the robots are doing the job, but additional engineering is underway to increase their speed.
In the future for Redland Brick are more facility upgrades. Because of the company's previous ties to European firms, Vinke says Redland "has a network to look beyond our borders for new technology." Depending on the results of a feasibility study, the Harmar plant may be replaced with a state of the art facility with construction starting as early as next year.
Vinke says Redland is also looking at acquisition opportunities. "We're not in the process now of acquiring, but we're looking for the right opportunity in the brick business. We could fit another business in our structure rather easily."
Copyright News for Business, Inc. May 1999