SPRING 2015

62 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S

62 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK ROTORCLIP COMPANY INC. 187 Davidson Avenue, Somerset, NJ 08873 TEL 1-800-557-6867 FAX 732-469-7898 EMAIL RCBook@rotorclip.com WEB www.rotorclip.com BOB SLASS AND THE “GARAGE ENTREPRENEURS” by Joe Cappello (Excerpt from the upcoming book on Robert Slass, Founder of Rotor Clip Company, a successful US manufacturer of retaining rings) Robert Slass started Rotor Clip Company in 1957 in a small, 2000 square foot facility in Farmingdale, New York. “It was like a large living room,” he would say with a smile, as he spoke of those days. He would to buy used equipment and refurbish it. He would buy broken stamping presses and made one good one, using parts from the other machines. He experimented with ways to produce retaining rings from a strip of steel with as little waste as possible, which significantly reduced costs to the customer. Today, the company he founded occupies over 238,000 square feet in Somerset, New Jersey, and services a variety of companies in North America, Europe and Asia with tapered, constant section and spiral retaining rings, wave springs and self-compensating hose clamps. “There were a lot of guys like me who started businesses in their garages and American corporations would buy from them,” Bob recalled one day. These small spaces were hotbeds of innovation after World War II, where ideas could be tried and perfected with a THE FIRST ROTOR CLIP BUILDING IN FARMINGDALE, NEW YORK, WAS LIKE A "LARGE LIVING ROOM" ACCORDING TO ROTOR CLIP FOUNDER AND ENTREPRENEUR, ROBERT SLASS. minimum amount of investment. Eventually, some of these companies, like Rotor Clip, became leaders in their industries. Some notable examples: [1] The roots of HP were nurtured in a garage in Palo Alto, California, with Bill Hewlett and David Packard scraping together an initial investment of 8 in 1939. By 1966, HP entered the computer market and is now one of the world’s largest technology corporations. (The one-car garage where it all began is a designated California historic landmark). [2] Both Bernard Silver and N. Joseph Woodland were graduate students at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the late 1940’s. They got involved in a project proposed by a local grocer to invent a way to encode product data so supermarket items could be automatically checked out. Woodland spent time on the beach at his grandparent’s home in Miami Beach, Florida, drawing shapes in the sand that would form the basis of a graphic version of the Morse code he had learned as a boy scout. He and Silver patented the idea in the early 1950’s, and sold it eventually for ,000, not realizing that it would someday evolve into the bar codes that would be used on virtually every product. BUSINESS FOCUS ARTICLE CONTINUED ON PAGE 168