On cold, clear days here, you can look up and see fragile contrails against the sky and tiny jetliners racing past.
Such was the scene in January 1999, when Rick Organ, then the new president and CEO of Schneller Inc., a plastics company in Kent, spoke to employees at his first annual meeting.
"It's the fool who fails to account for storms in good weath-
er," Organ, a trim, athletic-looking man with dark hair and sharp features, told his new associates,
Years later, he remembered the surprised looks Schneller's chemists, machine operators, designers and secretaries cast at one another. "What's this new guy saying?" they wondered.
Schneller was strong. It had bought a competitor in Florida. The mostly domestic airlines it had supplied with materials for 34 years were flying high. The future seemed as bright as the woodsy winter scene outdoors.
Organ may be an optimist, but from having served on the company board while still in his previous job with Valvoline, he knew the enterprise he was hired to steer into the 21st century could face trouble ahead.
In fact, with essentially one industry buying its products, mostly on one continent, he figured it was only a matter of time.
"The company was unbalanced," he said in a recent conversation in his office, which looks out through a sweeping bay window. "It was like a stool with one leg."
His strategy is to add stability. It seems to be working.
The company's only market sat in airline passenger compartments among curvy panels, soft colors and organic shapes. A range of materials and patterns covers every surface: bulkheads, seats and floors, all with a purpose: skid-proof entryway and lavatories, carpeted aisles, ceilings of layered panels that shield cabin lights.
It's all plastic. Almost everything in sight has a polymer base. Polymers are large-molecule synthetic materials that workers can shape, mold, emboss, tint, laminate or embed with rigid fibers (or even with organic material, including leaves, bamboo shoots or moss). Polymer products can be hard, soft, puffy, flat, slick, wavy, rough.
Chemical companies make the materials from petroleum. Other companies, like Schneller, turn train cars full of petroleum-based goo into decorative panels and films. Still others mold and press them into shapes for virtually every aspect of people's lives.
Charles Rogers, a polymer science professor emeritus at Case Western Reserve University, said such materials - robust, lightweight and flame-resistant - are ideal for aircraft.
From its founding in 1964, Schneller had sold panels for airline passenger seats, tray tables and bulkheads and films to decorate and protect surfaces throughout interiors. It made for good business, "a sexy business," Organ called it, and solid growth, mostly from the North American flight industry.
But when Organ arrived as chief, a financial guy with a focus on international trade, he saw storms on the horizon. His message to employees was a warning that a change would come.
Several, actually. Organ, 48 and a father of two who lives in Hudson, first pushed the company to cultivate new customers abroad. Domestic airlines and aircraft manufacturers represented two-thirds of Schneller's business in '99, foreign carriers one-third.
"Now that's reversed," he said. One of its biggest customers, in fact, is Airbus, the multinational European competitor to America's jet-making giant, Boeing.
More recently, the Asian market has accelerated like a 747 blazing toward takeoff. That's why the company established offshore sales offices in Paris and Singapore.
But, as the global aviation free-fall after 2000 and especially following Sept. 11, 2001, showed, passenger miles can drop, profits head south and plane orders plummet. Schneller needed customers outside commercial aviation to maintain more consistent growth.
Serving the transportation business was where the late John Schneller and partner Don Cardis (who's still on the board) started. It's also where Organ found customers for a second line of plastic products: the railroad industry.
It's still a vital niche, especially in Europe and in large American cities with commuter lines and light-rail systems, like Cleveland's rapid. So as soon as Schneller had ratcheted up its international aviation business, it developed similar decorative laminates for rail-car interiors.
There, the selling points for glass-fiber-reinforced plastic laminates, films and flooring material were almost the same as for aviation uses - durability, ease of maintenance and safety, including scant toxic fume emission, Case's Rogers said. In addition, the materials can take any shape, color and design a customer wants.
Once Schneller secured its place in the rail market, by 2003, Organ and the board began considering another place to sell the company's products: commercial architectural décor.
In mid-2005, they began adapting plastic materials to dress up bank lobbies, restaurants, college campuses and office complexes. And this year they launched Veritas, a line of stylish decorative films and laminates for interior designers.
In his office, Organ, wearing a plaid shirt and dress slacks, lugged a sample case of about a cubic foot to a table and flipped it open. Its compartments were filled with plastic samples.
The little squares had ripples, swirls, colors beyond nature. They were embedded with metallic-like rods, fishnet, even vegetation. That was only the beginning.
"You can combine any of these features in an incredible number of ways," Organ said. For, say, the surface of a product display case, a designer could match a brushed aluminum laminate with a cobalt-blue tint and a herringbone texture.
Someone at Schneller figured the encased samples and their combinations total 17,000 visual and texture possibilities, any of which interior designers could use to distinguish their look from others.
The company developed the materials based on its experience with the transportation industry. And panels can be molded into light diffusers, wall coverings, sconces, countertops, ceilings and more. Organ said product development was easy. "The hard work was putting together the sales network."
After months of interviewing, it now has rep firms in 20 metropolitan design centers around the U.S. The products are getting attention.
Veritas, with its graphic-intensive brochures and hip magazine ads ("Bend me. Shape me. Any way you want me." is one slogan) has pushed Schneller into a new realm, all in North American now, but perhaps, later, internationally.
Organ said he plans more change at the company. One possibility is adapting a fresh design line that would aim at the residential instead of commercial market. Then the ads would appear in Architectural Digest and Dwell magazines instead of trade publications.
But the usually candid CEO isn't saying for sure what's next.
"You know some of these designers will find ways to use the commercial products in residential interiors, but, well," he said, pausing, "we'll see."
One step at a time. People have been decorating their surroundings since they made cave drawings. Schneller's jet-age polymer panels just provide another medium.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: , 216-999-4116
