The company made one product for forty-one years. In 2014 it made a second one, badly, and lost enough money in eighteen months that the family met to discuss selling.
What they did instead is the reason there is a story here. They kept the new line, cut everything around it, and spent three years rebuilding the operation around a customer who had not existed when the founder opened the doors.
Revenue has grown ninefold since. The factory is the same building. The most consequential decision, the current chief executive says, was not the expansion — it was refusing to treat the failure as a reason to go back.
