Tailored Label Products Inc., a Menomonee Falls-based label and printing production company, is growing “ridiculously fast,” says the company’s president, Mike Erwin.
The company produces a wide array of label products, including DNA test vial labels, chemical resistant tags, promotional magnets, high-end automotive aftermarket product labeling and crowd control bands.
Last year, the company had more than $9 million in revenues, and this year it expects to hit $11 million in revenues. The company’s revenues are up 21 percent year-to-date, Erwin said.
The company has increased its number of employees from 29 in 2003 to 53 in 2007.
“I expect our sales to continue to grow at a double-digit rate and our employment to grow as well,” Erwin said.
The company plans to expand its facility to accommodate that growth. Tailored Label Products currently occupies about 28,000 square feet of space in a 60,000-square-foot building that it owns at W165 N5731 Ridgewood Dive. Another tenant in the building, Proven Direct, plans to move to a building under construction in the Menomonee River Valley in Milwaukee. Tailored Label Products will occupy most if not all of the space currently occupied by Proven Direct and by next year will have about 50,000 square feet of space in the Menomonee Falls building, Erwin said.
Erwin pointed to three factors that have led to his company’s impressive growth: the use of new technology, expanding services for customers and co-inventing products for key accounts.
During the last three years, the company has spent about $2 million on new technology. “For a small company like us, that’s huge,” Erwin said.
However, the company does its best to make sure those capital investments pay off.
“There isn’t a thing that’s put in here without a rate of return calculated, anticipated and checked,” Erwin said. “We’ve brought a lot of new equipment and we’re using it in a number of clever ways for a number of our key accounts.”
Tailored Label Products originally operated as a traditional job shop that simply produced a product that its customer requested. The firm has evolved into one that is instead presented a problem by a customer seeking a solution.
To solve those problems, Tailored Label Products and some of its customer have invented new products that they co-share in the patent and commercial deployment of the product, Erwin said.
“We’re doing far more innovating than just a regular, classic job shop,” he said.
Tailored Label Products Inc.
Address: W165 N5731 Ridgewood Drive, Menomonee Falls
Web site: www.tailoredlabel.com
industry: Label and printing production
Revenues: Expects $111 million this year
Employees: 53
