Reed Rubber Products

Company Overview

Reed Rubber, located in St. Louis, Missouri, opened its doors in 1922 as a small retailer, and in 2022 celebrated 100 years in business, setting new sales records, and winning Rubber & Plastic’s Best Places to Work award.

Leadership: Clark Reed, chairman of the board; Bob Barciszewski, president; Oliver Reed, vice president; Alex Reed, chief experience officer.

Website

Location: Saint Louis, MO

Years in business: 103, founded in 1922

Company motto: Details Matter

Q&A with Bob Barciszewski

What products and services does your company offer?
We offer TPV (Thermoplastic Vulcanizate) glazing seals, weatherstripping, and setting blocks.

What are your company's keys to success?

Being accessible – we connect our customers’ engineers with our engineers as early as possible in the process. Our customers get the information or assistance they need easily and quickly.
Enjoying the work – by emphasizing a detail-oriented approach, we elevate the importance of our work. Producing a quality seal or solving a challenging problem for a customer feels rewarding. Rubber & Plastics News has named us one of the best places to work for the last 5 years running, and I think finding joy in our work is certainly part of that.
Our material – this sounds quite clinical following the previous two, but it’s true. We primarily extrude with a thermoplastic vulcanizate that performs like a thermoset (e.g. EPDM, silicone), and this provides us with some unique benefits. It also comes with an environmental advantage over thermosets: it’s recyclable! We recycle and reuse 100% of our production scrap.

What’s something your company does that sets you apart from others, or that has been helpful to the way you do business or your bottom line?
The shorthand analogy for rubber extrusion manufacturing is the old Play-Doh Fun Factory toys: we push material through dies to make a variety of shapes. But at Reed, we’re not just making shapes, we’re making components that will be installed in larger systems. To best serve our customers, we try to understand as much as we can about the system in which our seals must operate.

We pour a lot of engineering resources and effort into product development. We ask a lot of questions. We educate ourselves - we enroll our business development managers and engineers in the FGIA FenestrationAssociate® and FenestrationMaster® programs. We developed our own curriculum to teach every single employee about the fenestration industry. We are invested in our own success, of course, but we are also invested in the success of the industry.

Why did you join NGA?
We joined NGA to participate in technical committees and task groups, to network and receive the latest in industry news and updates, and to support our industry association.

What is a big glass project or accomplishment for your company?
In a research and development success last year, we tested two new material blends from which we can manufacture PIB-compatible setting blocks that are much more cost-effective than standard silicone blocks. Some of our customers enjoyed significant savings from this development.