Spectex Doubles in Size

From left: Steve Rossi, Victor Pisinski, Kevin Stanley of Spectex. Photo by Judi Currie.

Through nearly two decades of careful planning, acquisitions and strategic moves, Spectex continues to expand its material converting and contract manufacturing operations. It also recently doubled the size of its manufacturing facility, taking over the former Electro Craft building on Progress Drive in Dover.

Founders and principals, CEO Victor Pisinski and COO Kevin Stanley, started Spectex in 2001 in the Gonic Mill in Rochester. Pisinski says he and Stanley took a leap of faith to start the business, and within five years they were looking to expand.

Driving the early growth was the 2005 acquisition of ERA, a Seabrook firm that specialized in cutting and slitting specialty materials. “The ERA family was looking for an exit strategy,” says Pisinski. “It coincided with our move to Airport Drive in Rochester, and then [in 2008] we acquired Booth Felt, giving us a foothold in the Chicago area.”

Steve Rossi joined Spectex in 2014 becoming president in 2017. The customer base is large, says Rossi, because of the range of materials they work with, from performance textiles to performance textiles to wool to silicone to rubber and metals. “Our products are distributed throughout the U.S., with a clump in Chicago, New England and even Mexico. The people who use us the most are textile companies in the Northeast,” Rossi says.

Spectex customers include Grainger, 3M, Philips/Respironics, Honeywell Safety, L.L. Bean and American Surgical. Products can be a simple as sticky felt dots or as complex as surgical and aerospace applications. Pisinski, an elite collegiate rower, combined his passion for rowing with the company’s knowledge of performance foam materials and cutting capabilities to design a rower’s seat pad that was used by the Silver Medal-winning U.S. Rowing Team in the 2016 Summer Olympics.

“You have to focus on finding the niche markets,” Pisinski says. “If you’re trying to cut millions of parts and chase big overseas manufacturers it just won’t work.”

In 2017, Spectex became a fully certified ISO 9001:2015 company, which Rossi says is valuable, as it speaks to the quality the company offers as well as its management systems and practices. The company will continue its focus on highly engineered products and processes, while the larger facility will also allow for the expansion of its commodity and e-commerce product lines, Booth Felt and Rowing Pad.

For more information, visit spectex.com.