Hickory Springs Celebrates 50 Years of Foam

January 28, 2010  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in on January 29, 2010

The year 2010 marks the 66th anniversary of the founding of Hickory Springs Manufacturing Co. It's also the 50th anniversary of the Hickory, N.C.-based company's manufacture of flexible polyurethane foam.

When interviewed for Hickory Springs€™ 60th Anniversary oral history, Bob W. Bush Sr., who retired as vice president-sales in 2002 and died this month at age 78, remembered the company's early years in foam. When latex foam was king in the 1950s, Hickory Springs began bringing in latex molded slabs from up North. Bush, at that time an always-on-the-road salesman for the furniture and bedding spring company, began looking for "a plastic foam that would compete with latex foam."

He visited Tennessee Eastman in Kingsport and spoke with its sales manager, who agreed to assist with experimentation and shipped several hundred pounds of raw material to Hickory Springs' plant in the Hickory area community of Brookford. Company founder Parks Underdown agreed to fund Bush€™s trials to the tune of a thousand dollars.

"So I went to Duke," Bush recalled. "My chemistry professor was Dr. Brown, a lady. And Dr. Brown, I thought, was very sharp and I told her what I wanted to do and would she like that for a project. I couldn't pay but a thousand dollars and I would buy whatever chemicals she needed. And she said, 'Oh, we have all those. She had to bring it before the department board. Well, she got approval in about twenty minutes. So they did, and they worked on it and worked on it and it didn€™t work. But that was where it started, so then urethane foam, which was what we know today, came along, again from Yankee producers, from companies like General Tire and Rubber and Sheller Globe, we started buying it, probably around 1957 or '58."

As Bush remembered, "DuPont was the big maker of one of the ingredients at that time, so we called for their salesman who came in and said, 'Well, y'all aren€™t big enough to be in the business.'"

Shortly thereafter, an Allied Chemical salesman who lived in Charlotte helped put Hickory Springs in the flexible slabstock polyurethane business. He recommended a chemist from Miami who had worked for Hudson Cushion Foam. Ken Fontaine signed on with Hickory Springs on the basis that he could make foam for "x dollars and he could do it in ninety days," Bush said.

The move put Hickory Springs in the urethane foam business, around May of 1960.

Fontaine made €œpretty good foam. We were able to sell it, but we were selling it at a loss. We lost our rear. It took us several years to figure out exactly which way to go to keep
from losing money. But we did.€

Now with foam production plants in Arkansas, Georgia, California, Oregon, Mississippi and North Carolina, Hickory Springs has several flexible polyurethane foam events planned for the first half of 2010, including an Earth Day ceremony and other programs still in the planning stages.

One of North Carolina€™s largest employers, Hickory Springs is a privately-held company with more than 50 manufacturing plants in 16 states and China. Hickory Springs manufactures component parts for the upholstered furniture, bedding, automotive, packaging and other industries.