Charleston, SC Economic Development

Company offers specialty equipment that detects harmful contaminants

Jul. 1, 2004
Charleston Post and Courier
By Lauren Wilbert
Paul Strickler used to sell laboratory equipment. Now he makes it.

While visiting a hospital as a technical sales representative for Fisher Scientific International Inc., Strickler saw an opportunity that no manufacturer was exploiting at the time: specialty products to increase efficiency in testing for environmental contaminants.

"Efficiency is key (in hospitals), so everything is pre-packaged and specific to each test, but things were done much differently in other companies," he said.

Strickler approached a colleague, John Stone, with his idea, and the two joined forces to create Environmental Express. The Mount Pleasant company is in its 15th year in business and is still growing rapidly.

The company's products include equipment designed to perform specific tests, as opposed to the general-purpose testing equipment most companies offer, as well as supplies such as filters and disposable sampling containers. Environmental Express started with products for air sampling for asbestos, lead, mold and dust, then expanded to products for water, wastewater and soil analysis.

"What we try to do for the environmental labs is to find products for them to use quickly," Strickler explained. "Instead of making cake from scratch, our customers can use cake mix."

The company sells its ready-made equipment and supplies to a variety of industries, such as commercial laboratories, municipal water treatment facilities, state and federal regulatory labs under the Environmental Protection Act, and manufacturers.

Strickler said the business has done well because no other company has duplicated the "cake mix" concept.

"Of the products we make, none of them are huge market items," he said. "The large companies can't compete with us because our products are one-of-a-kind, and smaller companies can't break in because the barriers for entry are pretty high.

"We're the only company like ours," he added. "In a sense, you could say we're the only company like this in the world, and definitely the only one east of the Mississippi."

Maintaining the company's uniqueness requires constant innovation and investment, however.

One big investment has been in Environmental Express' own manufacturing equipment, which is also one-of-a-kind. The company uses custom-made robots that can manufacture, sort, weigh, print and apply weight labels. Down the hall, another robot makes the company's most successful and fastest-growing product -- plastic Hot Block vessels used to prepare metal samples for analysis -- at 10.1 seconds a tube, or 34,000 a day.

The robots run 24 hours a day, five days a week, and run "lights out" to keep up with demand. The company ships at least 200 boxes of products every afternoon, a number that keeps rising.

Strickler said the company has grown at least 15 percent every year and is working on expanding in international markets.

As a benchmark, Strickler pointed to growth in one of the company's original products. "We sold 4,000 ProWeigh filters in our first year, and we're at 1.5 million this year," he noted.

One thing that has helped propel that growth is the company's readiness to meet customers' needs.

General Engineering Laboratories, a Charleston-based testing lab and Environmental Express' largest local client, depends on the company's custom products and appreciates the close relationship with Strickler.

Jamie Johnson, group leader of inorganics testing for metals at GEL, said Strickler and his company make personal visits to the lab to look for ways to create more efficient products and testing methods.

"In the past six months, there's been at least three areas they've helped us improve on," Johnson said. "They'll design anything we need. All we have to do is tell them what we want and they put it through their plastics machine and spit it out just like that."

Johnson said larger companies that mass-produce their products can't compete with Environmental Express because they are not willing to make specialty items.

"If (Environmental Express) thinks they can sell half a dozen of one product to us, they'll make it because they figure if we need it, someone else down the line will, too," he said. "If we asked a larger company to do that, they'd probably tell us, 'We'd have to redesign our whole product line for that,' and wouldn't help us out."
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