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Lee Spring is a spring manufacturing company that's been
in business since 1918.
It started here in Brooklyn, New York.
This is still our headquarters.
And we make mechanical springs of all various different types.
We have many thousands of customers in almost any industry that you could think of.
We've been involved in industries including aerospace, medical, transportation,
industrial products, automation, consumer products,
any device that has moving parts has a spring in it someplace.
Sometimes springs are considered a commodity item but we base our success
on using our engineering expertise to really work with customers
who find things that can help them the most.
We've grown from that small shop on Union Street in Brooklyn in 1918
to eight worldwide locations now including five in the United States.
In Brooklyn we have about 100 employees and we have about 300 employees worldwide.
Manufacturing, it's alive and well and growing in Brooklyn.
Any time you're in an airplane, from now on you will think of Lee Spring.
How about your seatbelt?
There are two torsion springs in every seatbelt.
We make those.
We're in everyday life and we'll continue to be.
We've had scary times, don't get me wrong.
Under my watch we've had a couple of recessions, the last one was a real beauty.
Around the turn of the century there was kind of another recession going on.
And the world was changing very rapidly at that time.
I became president of Lee Spring in 1999.
Our model for success was starting not to work.
We knew that it was time to do something different.
Al Mangels walked through and I was introduced to him and I asked him if he wanted
to join us so he sat down and one of the things that I mentioned that ITAC was doing
at that particular time was lean manufacturing.
And I think that's basically all he needed to hear I think because Al had been,
Al is the kind of guy that's always looking to see what's going on, to see what new kinds
of things he can bring to Lee Spring.
That's 11 years ago.
It seems so long ago now and some of the things that we have started with back then
that were so alien to us are now so commonplace in our company that we don't even realize
that that's where it all came from.
There are people here now in the management group that haven't been here that long
and they had no idea that our pool system came from a project that we worked on with ITAC.
As things come up and as we feel we need help in certain subjects,
well there's certainly one place that we can go.
We're constantly looking at what's the latest and greatest technology,
reading up on the latest trends in the spring industry, which I think tends
to be behind the times so we try to stay not only with the times but ahead of the times
so it's about solving the customers problems and the plastic spring has done something.
One of our plastic springs, it's extremely difficult to mold and that was actually one
of the trickiest parts is to the extent that people have attempted plastic springs
in the past, there's always a stepping nature to them.
To become a very smooth element spring required a very unique and patentable device.
The idea of plastic, most people think plastic springs they think
of toys, they think of Slinkys.
We needed to come up with something very, very unique and we're looking for something
that people hadn't thought was possible.
Certainly it's the kind of innovation that you know that companies need
to maintain their growth and to remain competitive.
Lee Spring is coming off its best year in history
and we don't see anything but bright skies ahead.
I think the secret to success is just very basic continuous improvement,
always looking at what you're doing, questioning whether it's the best way to do it
and saying there must be a better way.
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