From Earth Orbit to the Space Shuttle

John’s Story

When I joined PFC right out of college in the early 1980s, it was a pivotal moment in the company’s history. Peter Schurman had invented the double-wall blow molded carrying case 20 years earlier. And in the two decades that followed, he had founded PFC and spun off subsidiaries in Iowa, North Carolina, California, and Connecticut, and licensed other companies to make double-wall cases in Canada, France, and Spain.

When Peter hired me, PFC hadn’t made any cases itself for five years. Instead, the company had shifted its focus to supporting those seven other companies – providing design assistance, mold tooling, specialized machinery, and the use of numerous patents.

My job was straightforward: to help PFC return to making and selling cases itself, but with a change in strategy. Up to that moment, making double-wall cases was a high-volume business. Virtually every application was a one-off design that required its own custom mold tooling. Custom molds are expensive, so customers had to have both deep pockets from the get-go and their products had to sell in high enough volumes to justify those expensive molds. That was a problem; it meant that a lot of smaller companies, as well as those whose products sold in lower volumes, were simply out of luck.

The solution was the invention of a patented system of modular mold tooling. Using that new modular system, PFC was able to construct a proprietary line of standard cases in over 100 sizes. And because the molds are modular, we can easily modify those standard cases with mold tooling made for a specific application – creating custom cases for a lot less than one-off custom molds.  How much less? As much as 90 percent less in many instances.

Over the last 40 years, our modular tooling and standard proprietary molds have allowed us to make cases for customers of all sizes doing business in hundreds of different markets, packaging thousands of different products used in all kinds of challenging environments – from earth orbit on the Space Shuttle to places where the sun don’t shine. Literally.