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Company History
Superior Glove’s Acton location was in close proximity to Canada’s largest leather tannery. Acton was known as Canada’s Leather capital, with numerous tanneries, shoe companies, and glove factories within the relatively small population of five-thousand. In fact, the nearby tannery, Beardmore Leather, was not only Canada’s largest tannery, but the largest in the British Commonwealth. And by close proximity, we mean that they surrounded us on three sides. Because of this, a lot of work went into building a strong alliance with Beardmore, giving Superior access to parts of the cowhide that they considered to be a by-product of their core business: shoe and upholstery leather.
We started our own tannery to further process the suede leather they were land filling, since there was no ready market at the time for it. The resulting low raw-material cost was an opportunity that Superior took full advantage of, and provided us with the incentive to develop new styles based on this. We then targeted large industrial end users, who could purchase large volumes of these styles. Working with these end users, we tailored our styles to suit the jobs and specific protection their employees needed. Automotive stamping plants were our first target market outside of farmers, and selling direct to factories replaced the retail distribution channel. Our first industrial glove customer was Rockwell International in Milton in 1963, with many more to follow: Stelco, Dofasco, GM, Ford, Magna, and hundreds of other automotive and metal industry accounts. These were major companies situated mainly along the Windsor to Oshawa 401 corridor. This was a strategy that served us extremely well for the next twenty-five years. However, around 1985, we could see the writing on the wall regarding the increasing limitations of this business strategy. Many companies were reducing their vendor base, consolidating their purchasing to reduce the number of suppliers and purchase orders. Some automotive plants reduced their suppliers of plant supplies from many thousands to less than one-hundred. Now, one distribution company was supplying the toilet paper, light bulbs, hand tools, wiping rags, and work gloves, where before they would have bought them from the companies that specialized in just those commodities. Furthermore, the purchasing decisions in some of our largest accounts were being transferred to U.S. head offices, and places where we had no sales coverage. Some of the contracts that were being given out required suppliers to have the North American sales and distribution capacity to serve twenty or more plants right across Canada, the U.S.A. and Mexico. These contracts presented two major problems for us: they were either too large, or we simply could not provide such far-flung locations with the level of service they demanded.
To address issues that we recognized would only continue to increase in the future, we initiated the transition from selling direct to selling through distribution. This was extremely difficult, as we now had to convince distributors that we formerly competed against to view us a potential supplier and partner. Our salespeople had to focus an immense amount of effort on communication with targeted distributors in order to switch existing accounts over to them and work on new business together as a team. Up until the mid 1980's, leather gloves had been the focus and strength of our company. We were vertically integrated, with our own tannery producing all the leather we needed. However, we also saw the new technology coming out of Japan: robotically knit gloves controlled by computerized knitting machines. We were quite aware that adopting this technology would revolutionize our industry, especially when compared with the process to make cotton work gloves at the time. It was labor intensive, involving many manufacturing steps: spin yarn, weave fabric from the yarn, cut fabric into the glove pattern, sew pieces together, add a cuff, turn right side out. The robotically knit gloves drastically simplified that: spin yarn, knit glove from that yarn. One of these machines could knit a complete glove every two minutes, while one operator could run fifty machines. The machines were very capital expensive, but the labor cost savings were huge. We were early adopters of this technology and invested heavily in it. Our present production capacity is over one-hundred thousand pairs per day, on over three-hundred sets of these knitting machines. Furthermore, the majority of the gloves we knit go on to value-added processing in our plants. We either dip them in synthetic rubber to add wear and puncture resistance to them, add PVC dots to them to enhance grip and abrasion resistance, or sew on leather palms to them to make them suitable for other jobs. This change over has netted big gains for us: we are now in the top three glove companies in Canada, by any measure of size. We have also evolved from five different glove styles in 1961, to over twenty-five-hundred different styles today.
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