Hilary & Jim Pass the Baton – the End of an Era

To all of our loyal customers:

Over the 25 years plus that we (Jim and Hilary) have run this company, our customers have been the best and we want to thank each and every one of you. As we pass the baton to a new owner, we thought we would leave you with a brief narrative. You might enjoy it.

Prior to 1992, it was virtually impossible to purchase new textile braided lamp wire anywhere in the US. If you were lucky, you could find a few spools of new old stock sitting on a shelf in your local hardware store. But all the major American wire and cable manufacturers, most of them located in the Northeast, had ceased production years prior due to lack of demand.

As it happened, in 1990, Jim worked on a feature film called Billy Bathgate, set in the Great Depression era, and the sets for that film required hundreds of feet of cloth covered wire, both twisted lamp cord and knob and tube wire. Jim bought all the old stock he could find within a hundred miles of the studio and locations.

After that film, Jim decided that even though this was a niche product, there would be plenty of customers interested in using it if he could find a way to manufacture it again. He returned to his home in Connecticut and made many calls and many trips to wire and cable factories in Rhode Island and Massachusetts before locating a man named Burt Piggins, who agreed to manufacture a single 10,000 foot run of brown twisted pair wire. Remember — this was before Google. This was gumshoe work. You looked up a factory in the yellow pages, or this huge industrial registry called the Thomas Guide, and then you started at one place and got a name for another. It was detective work as much as anything.

The resulting wire was not great. The twist was loose, and the coarse yarn used was fiberglass. It was unattractive. Jim is a set decorator by trade. Aesthetics matter. He began investigating different yarn suppliers and dye houses, until finally settling on the right suppliers who could deliver consistent quality yarn. All along, it was important to source US suppliers. This was easy for the cotton. For the rayon, which is the closest to duplicating silk, this proved impossible. But because silk was used as an early overbraid material (Hilary spent time at the Edison archives in Menlo Park, New Jersey, examining wire there), it was important to offer rayon wire as a key part of the product line.

Initially, for the first several years, wire was produced in black and brown, in small runs, and put up on 250-foot spools. It was stored in our garage or a storage shed, wherever we had room. By the late 90’s, at the dawn of the internet, but before the World Wide Web, Hilary, a software engineer at Data General, kluged together a website hosted by our email server at the time which was a local coffeehouse named Javanet. It was quite lovely, considering the tools available at that time, basically just plain old HTML, but ordering was cumbersome. The website generated a form from the products chosen and you’d fill it out and mail it to us with a check. There are still some components lurking in or photos.

By this time, we had engaged a small wire and cable factory in Leeds, Massachusetts, called Berkshire Electric, that was willing to produce our wire with the colored rayon and cotton yarns that we supplied them. They had been around long enough that they had made twisted wire before and could produce it for us. There was a lot of head scratching on their end. We would arrive at their loading dock in our beat up 1986 Silver Volvo 240 station wagon to unload cases of yarn, wound on cardboard tubes that would fit their century-old Wardwell braiding machines.

When the wire was ready for pickup, we would retrieve it in the same Volvo. We became familiar faces on the oily factory floor, and were always asked, “Who buys that stuff?”, and if we complained about gaps in the braid or some other flaw, the curmudgeonly guy who was our rep said, “Wire isn’t jewelry.”  He couldn’t understand that people cared how it looked.

Our very first honest to goodness internet customer was a man in San Francisco who wanted to order about seven feet of twisted wire to power an electric headlamp for a vintage bicycle he was restoring. Yes! Finally! Vindication! Someone not in the movie business, but an outlier. Sure, it was only an order for seven feet of wire. But here was our product, helping someone restore his vintage bike. Who would have thunk it?

Next, word spread among the vintage electric fan collecting community that our wire was available and of great use to them. We attracted an entire new legion of customers from that world plus what wires were appropriate for head wires, which we’d never heard of at that point.

As the Internet improved and ecommerce becaume available, Hilary continued to improve and redesign our site. Sales grew. Our wire began to fill our entire garage. The Post office and UPS were picking up daily – from our front porch. Then custom orders came in. Nordstrom department stores ordered thousands of feet for a nationwide window display, which required us to produce a red and putty wire in a custom braid pattern, packaged in pre-cut lengths, wired with Bakelite plugs, packaged and sent out to dozens of different stores all at the same time. Our entire house and basement became a sweatshop for two weeks. We enlisted family and friends to meet the deadline.

For a year or two, stylists at Martha Stewart magazine featured our wire in crafts projects. That was an unexpected thrill.

By 2011, we were bursting at the seams. We searched for a warehouse and office space, choosing the second floor of a one-hundred-year-old mill in Florence, Massachusetts, next to a river that used to power the mill. The owner built our space to suit. The office and shipping room is large and spacious with tall windows that overlook the Mill River. Behind that is the warehouse space where all the spools of wire are stored on steel shelving. We furnished the office in an early mid-century style of grey Steelcase tank desks and tables – a retro space for a retro product.

Besides relocating into a better space, we were blessed with a very resourceful and dedicated employee named Ian Nelson, who had been working with us when we ran the business from our home and with whom many of you have interacted. Together, we shaped the new space to be a fun, efficient, and productive place to work.

Within a few years, Berkshire Electric, the factory that had been supplying our wire, was sold and closed, and we had to decide whether to cease operations ourselves, or start our own factory.

Taking the plunge, we applied for a small business loan. We purchased six Wardwell braiding machines from the same factory in Pawtucket, RI, that has been producing them for well over a century. We bought a twinner to produce the twisted wire — a machine so large that it had to be lifted into our factory by a crane through a second-floor window. We bought a custom-made re-spooler, that takes the large 5,000-10,000 foot spools of wire from the braiders and re-spools them down to smaller size spools.

And of course, we purchased much other equipment as well.

So now we had a factory! And things were swell! But a few things happened. The first was: China. Lots of people saw what we were doing, and decided to copy us, but have the wire made in China, instead. Their specs were not as good. The yarns and braid were inferior. But to many people, that did not matter. And we could not compete with China on price. But still, we retained many loyal customers who valued our quality, historical accuracy, and customer service over cheap imitation wire.

Our sales took a hit, but we really didn’t see the next big disaster:

Covid.

That, and the resulting supply chain interruptions, were a big disaster for us. Not only did sales plunge during Covid, but the supply chain impact afterward was huge. In some cases, we waited for over a year for raw materials, which translated to backorders to our customers for over a year.

Being a small business with thin operating margins, we never had access to large capital. Riding out a very prolonged downturn was going to be ugly. With the writing on the wall, we decided we had little choice but to close the doors. We love the business and the product, and are proud of our legacy. But we are both at retirement age, and it takes a lot of energy to keep a small business running.

It was a heartbreaking decision, to close a business that manufactured a product that we alone re-introduced into the American market back in 1992. But this is an old story, told thousands of times over. Full of lots of what-ifs and shoulda coulda’s.

What we never expected, when we sent out the Going, Going, Gone email to all our wonderful, loyal customers, was that one of you would step in and rescue the company. For this, we are forever grateful.

And to all of you, the members of the motion picture community, the electric fan collectors, the vintage lamp restorers, the steampunk creators, the Burning Man crazy car person, our far flung international customers, the folks who order ten feet or 10,000 feet, and, lastly, that guy in San Francisco with the vintage bicycle, we owe you all a million thanks. It has been such a pleasure serving you over the years.