Dan King
VP – Production, R&D Davey Textile Solutions Inc
Our production capacity has grown 30x since our 2010 systems
What began as a small family operation over 35 years ago, Davey Textile Solutions has since expanded across North America, and into Mexico and South America. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada is home to the company’s 40,000 sq ft manufacturing facility and warehouse, but it also operates from a distribution warehouse in Houston, Texas, US. Vice President-Production, Research and Development Dan King speaks to Fibre2Fashion about protective wear.
What is the size of the protective wear market in the US? At what rate is it growing?
The North American market for commercial personal protective equipment (PPE) is $2.9 billion, of which $83 million is serviceable towards fire retardant (FR) PPE applications. The market is estimated to be growing at 5.6 per cent CAGR.
What is your market share in PPE?
High visibility trim is a small subset of this market. We are current selling about 17 per cent of the total addressable market in North America for trim.
Which are your major markets in the US and globally in terms of geography and applications?
We have a very high penetration in Canada (60+ per cent). We have a much smaller percentage in the US and Mexico, where we hope to target and grow to be more in line with the Canadian numbers.
How has the market for protective wear evolved post pandemic?
The pandemic did not directly affect our markets. The value of oil/gas and industrial market expansions was much more relevant. The challenges in Europe are likely more impacting. We have grown about 10 per cent per year over the last six years.
What are the challenges that the protective wear sector in the US faces?
Our primary challenge currently is the raw material supply. However, in the mid- to long-term labour will become a larger issue.
What is the annual production capacity at Davey?
Our production capacity has grown 30x since our 2010 systems. We are currently in another manufacturing growth cycle.
What is the annual budget allocated towards R&D?
We apply significant resources to R&D. If we include all funding sources, then we apply more than $500,000 towards it.
What new innovations and technologies are you working towards?
We are working on Future Factory initiatives, new fibres and lean six/sigma QC opportunities. We are also looking at diversification with new projects for the PPE market.
What new applications and products do you plan to introduce? What are the long-term goals?
We hope to be engineering a new fibre for the PPE market. We are also working with our local university to develop an End-of-Life sensor.
Published on: 15/12/2022
DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.
