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In 1954, when Walter Speck Sr. started this company
with his son, Walter Jr., Thermoforming was a new idea. The
method was untried until that point, but full of promise.
Since then the technology, the industry and our company have matured.
Speck Plastics is now an acknowledged leader. Materials producers
have relied on us heavily for testing new formulations, and we have
pioneered many new methods and refinements. Our company, whose management
now includes Walt Speck III and Suzann Speck, is still closely held
and closely managed.
We believe in continuity. We’re less interested in taking
short-term profits than in building long-term relationships. We’re
here every working day, in the office, on the phone and in the plant.
When we work for you, you know us and we know you.
The Speck Story
In the beginning…
For the Speck family, clear isn’t just what we do; it’s who we are. For three generations Speck has been at the forefront of plastics thermoforming. In fact, we trace our history to the days before Plexiglas was a household word. The story is a good one, and it underscores just why we’re so good at what we do.
Toiling in a Rohm & Haas laboratory in Bristol, Pennsylvania in the days following World War II, Walt Speck, Sr. had no idea that he was a pioneer of sorts. And yet, their lab was one of the first to commercialize Plexiglas, the acrylic wonderstuff that made its debut in 1936 and went on to play an important role in the war effort.
As a glazing material for Allied fighters and bombers, Plexiglas proved its effectiveness by virtue of its light weight, strength, and ease of forming. Unlike glass, Plexiglas was light and strong. It was also wind- and weatherproof, shatterproof and virtually bulletproof. Back in Bristol, Walt Speck supervised the production of chin-, turret-, and other window products; in this way he became one of the very first to thermoform Plexiglas.
After the war, Rohm & Haas sought to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the new material. It had accounted for two-thirds of their wartime revenue, and now they hoped to put that knowledge to use making civilian products.1 Engineers realized the same qualities that made Plexiglas such a natural fit for military uses meant it was also an ideal choice for safety glazing, windscreens, and a wide range of electrical and other applications.2
When Walt Speck took a job in one of Rohm & Haas’ commercial labs in 1937, he joined one of the teams that developed a number of these civilian applications. In this role, Speck helped to refine many of the processes that would enable use of Plexiglas for signs, lighting fixtures, and a wide range of automotive, architectural, and railroad applications.
The company saw that the real sales potential, however, was in being a source of sheet material to a broad base of fab shops. This meant that continuing to operate their own fabrication facility would put them in direct competition with their sheet customers, though, so Rohm & Haas closed their fab shop in 1947.
Speck found himself out of work with the shop closure, and the story could have ended there. The young engineer worked briefly for a Rohm & Haas customer during the Korean War, but eventually decided that his future lay in taking his knowledge of thermoforming—not to mention his familiarity with the key customers—and opening his own shop.
The marketplace was teeming with new technology-based products. That same year, RCA began manufacture of their first color television—the 12” model set early adopters back a whopping $1,000—and Texas Instruments introduced their Regency TR-2, the first commercially available transistor radio.3
Into this innovation-hungry landscape that Speck Plastics, Inc. was born. The 42-year-old Speck enlisted the help of his wife and a few friends, the Bond and Worrell families and set to work acquiring customers.
One of their first was a Yonkers, NY-based manufacturer of portable iron lungs. They challenged the young company to produce battery cases, and Speck jumped at the opportunity. He took out a second mortgage on his home, his wife went to work to provide additional financial support, and they were in business.
“They were the innovators,” says Walt Speck, III, the company’s current President. “They were forming polycarbonate and experimenting with pressure forming long before there was any sort of equipment dedicated to those purposes.”
The three couples would gather in the evenings to heat sheets of Plexiglas in the oven and shape them over bowling balls, standing on the softened sheets until they took the desired shape.
“My grandmother would throw fits, because the whole house smelled like acrylic monomer while she was making supper,” says President Suzann Speck. “During those early years, though, they learned an awful lot about working with Plexiglas, especially clear Plexiglas. Opaque parts can be painted, and they let you hide all sorts of defects and deficiencies. With clear parts there’s no place to hide. My Grandfather really became an early expert in thermoforming of clear acrylics.”
By virtue of this burgeoning expertise, the company grew quickly. By 1957 they had moved out of the kitchen and into the basement of a car dealership on Long Island.
Without a map…
 - The Speck, Bond, and Worrell families welcome the new decade along with sales representative Stu Hayes and his wife, January, 1970.
When Collins Radio solicited a government contract for 5,000 simple dial covers in 1954, Walt Speck jumped at the opportunity. Even though his company was still in its infancy, he collected scrap material at work and took it home to start work on samples. Before long, he and his partners, the Bond and Worrell families, had set up an efficient and effective production line, with the husbands drilling holes in the sample covers and their wives filing the holes to meet the required specifications.
Thanks to the free material and a lack of overhead—the Bonds, Worrells, and Specks were willing to take only limited wages for the greater good of the enterprise—Speck’s prices were far below those of the others bidding on the Collins Radio job. The nascent company won the contract, and they were in business.
From the very beginning, Walt Speck, Jr. was an important part of the family business. Even before starting college in the fall of 1954, he was a part of the activity in the car dealership basement on Long Island. They weren’t there for long, however, before deciding that they could find more reasonable rent elsewhere. To make matters worse, it turned out that the Long Island location wasn’t zoned for the industrial work they had undertaken there.
During a leisurely drive through Easton, Pennsylvania, Speck, Sr. bumped into a real estate agent and asked if he knew of anything that would suit his business. The agent said he was trying to sell an unused burial vault casting shop in Nazareth; it was overgrown and run down, but at 75,000 square feet and with a purchase price equal to two years rent at the Long Island facility, Speck knew it was a move they had to make.
In 1956, Speck, Jr’s spent his summer break coordinating the move to Nazareth. He and Walt Worrell gave the newly purchased vault facility a thorough cleaning and got to work dismantling the equipment on Long Island.
The cleaning and shipping prep, though, proved to be the easy part. The two made as many as four 250-mile trips each day, shuttling equipment to Pennsylvania. By 1957, the transition to Nazareth was complete, and Speck, Sr. moved his family to Saylorsburg.
* * * * *
If Walt Speck, Sr. was the technological innovator, it was his son who realized the company’s long-term business potential.
“The business was Dad’s baby from the beginning,” Speck, Jr. says. “He would do anything for any customer, but sometimes he was enchanted by the technical challenge. I wanted to make the company profitable.”
That capitalist instinct, though, was underpinned by a deep understanding of the thermoforming process. Speck, Sr. insisted that his son spend his first two years on the job in the production area—many times working third shift—rather than taking the easy road to the corner office.
Through it all, Speck Plastics remained a trusted supplier to Rohm & Haas. Although they had been the first ones to commercialize Plexiglas, Rohm & Haas frequently brought the cutting-edge forming work to Speck in order to benefit from the smaller firm’s thermoforming expertise.
One such project was a 16”-thick window for the observation gondola on the bathyscaphe Trieste. The craft was in need of a window that could withstand the extreme pressure of the deep ocean; Rohm & Haas turned to Speck. Plexiglas thicknesses were limited to four inches at the time, so Speck needed to form and cement four separate four-inch plates—with no bubbles whatsoever—in order to meet the need.
Other noteworthy projects included clear antenna covers for the first TV antennae on the Empire State Building, as well as celestial navigation domes for non-pressurized aircraft. The latter required true optical perfection. Navigators would need distortion-free domes in order to properly sight their sextants, so after the forming step, Speck was required to inspect the domes in order to calculate the compensation figures that would ensure accurate navigation.
As the thermoforming industry grew through the 1960s, so, too, did Speck Plastics. The company added a significant military contracts, and the more than 125 production employees worked around the clock forming clear Plexiglas windows, fairings, and instrument cluster shields for Huey helicopters—at its peak, the company was cranking out in excess of 160 shipments every month.
Speck even had a chance to play a part in the space race; in 1968, when NASA needed to understand how rocket fuel behaved in zero gravity, they tapped Speck Plastics to build a clear fuel cell. This cell enabled them to watch fuel flow in weightless simulations, and ultimately aided in the design of the final fuel cell on the Apollo Lunar Entry Module (LEM).
“That was just one of many cases in which we worked ‘without a map,’” says Walt Speck, Jr. “These processes were fraught with challenges, and it took all of our ingenuity and innovation to solve some of these problems.”
In many cases, despite the world’s growing reliance on technology, those solutions came down to simple creativity and hard work.
“We were—and are—specialists in clear material,” Speck, Jr. goes on. “And a lot of times, we realized that the best way to reach a perfect end result was through hand sanding and polishing. Much of the time, it comes down to careful craftsmanship.”
A new course…
 - Walt Speck, III and Suzann discuss the finer points of thermoforming.
In the early 1990s, Suzann Speck stepped into the family business, working as a production secretary. Her brother Walt, meanwhile, left a radio career to fill a vacant position in sales and marketing. Coupled with his passion for flying, the job was a natural fit—the trained broadcaster could now fly- and pitch sales to customers outside the Lehigh Valley.
Although Walt Speck, Sr. probably hoped his enterprise would stay in the family, siblings and now co-presidents Walt and Suzann never foresaw themselves as third-generation business owners while they were growing up. Despite their regular exposure to the company, the two pursued other career interests. Walt became a radio writer and broadcaster while his sister studied hotel management and hospitality at college.
Within another decade, the siblings had officially purchased the company. Since 2000, Walt and Suzann have shared executive duties, with Suzann now chiefly overseeing sales and marketing and her brother directing operations. Both acknowledge they would not have assumed these roles without the support of the other.
“She [Suzann] and I have worked together, and we’ve been close since we were really little,” says Walt. “Her involvement absolutely made this [the purchase] possible. I would only want to do this with her help.”
As a result of his marketing experience, Walt initially ran the sales department after the 2000 purchase, while Suzann supervised operations. By 2006, they realized the roles were in reverse compared to their personalities and management styles.
“The switch was not a precipitous event,” says Suzann. “We only saw the rightness of it in hindsight. It just became clearer that my personality was better suited to sales and relationship building, and Walt knew much more about operations.”
* * * * *
Nothing could teach freshly-minted business owners how to weather crises quite like the recession that struck in 2000 and deepened after September 11, 2001. With a mere 16 months under their belts as co-presidents, Walt and Suzann found themselves vying against the worst possible ‘first challenge.’
“Going through that was awful. It was the worst thing I have ever experienced in my life,” says Walt.
He and Suzann remember too vividly the unceasing uncertainty that the 2000 recession brought to light.
But for as much stress as the period created for the Speck siblings, they would not have traded the experience for any other exercise.
“The training that [the 2000 recession] provided was invaluable because now, no matter what is thrown at us, it’s not as bad as that,” Walt says.
Riding out the recession also helped Walt to move beyond his concern of overseeing the business’s demise after only one year at the helm. In fact, he says he never wants to feel like the company has fully dodged that recession’s impact.
“There were some real dark times,” he says. “It helped me to get past the weight of three generations on my shoulders . . . I don’t ever want to feel like I’m out of it. I don’t want any sighs of relief.”
* * * * *
While their father and grandfather provided the keen entrepreneurial and business sense to drive Speck Plastics to its potential during the first 45 years, Suzann and brother Walt have worked very hard to steer the work environment in a forward-thinking direction to ensure the company’s longevity. With a set of core values in step with the company’s mission and vision statements, the co-presidents hope to foster a bottom-up approach where employees feel valued, empowered, and productive.
In October 2006, Walt attended the Manufacturing Leadership Institute, a program of the Iacocca Institute and Manufacturers Resource Center at Lehigh University, where he learned the particulars of writing a set of company values and developing the behaviors that support those values. By November, senior managers were introduced to the Speck Plastics values: self-discipline, courage, purpose-driven effort, and optimism.
Adopting a set of values is a key step for any company; the Speck siblings, though, recognize acutely the importance of maintaining those values and not tolerating the idea that they are merely window dressing.
“We made a commitment early on this was really the way we wanted to run the company,” Suzann says. “This was going to be more than just posters and handouts. Every day, we had to figure out how to make reference to vision and values during the course of the day.”
To advocate accountability on the part of all employees, the values are posted where daily production meetings occur. According to Suzann, the values statement also makes critical decisions much more straightforward.
“It becomes a lot easier, because your reasons for doing things—or not doing things—are all there on that piece of paper,” she says.
Walt also reviews the vision and values at regular monthly meetings, where he walks employees through the previous month’s performance and gross revenue.
Of course, implementing the values is not just a means of improving employee accountability. Both Walt and Suzann continue to improve their performance as co-presidents as well. Suzann is currently working with a business coach in order broaden her expertise; Walt, meanwhile, is working to implement a cycle-counting system for inventory control and a system for customers to review the progress of their orders online.
“We realize we have to be the best we can be in order to support the staff,” says Suzann. “We’re just trying to be better today than we were yesterday.”
Thanks for reading this month’s installment of the Speck InFORMer. Please feel free to browse our site or contact us to learn more about how Speck can put more than a half century of experience to work for you.
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