Ideas flow freely at C3 Corp. At times, they come out of thin air — literally.
For founder and CEO Joe Van De Hey, a machine is more than metal and electronics and moving parts. He sees possibilities that can solve problems, such as the need to save money by not shipping air trapped in large-volume items. Case in point; C3’s patented compression machine, the CWU2000, flattens foam mattresses down to the size of a golf bag.
That means more mattresses and less air on each truck, a big savings for the client.
“It’s what we do, is problem-solve,” Van De Hey says.
Without that vision and constant questioning, “How can we do it better?” the company still would depend upon the ebb and flow of the paper industry it first started serving — and, undoubtedly, not be the success story it is today.
Van De Hey realized the same kind of machinery that winds paper could be adapted to squash foam into packaging. And the same sort of laminator that added coatings to sheets of paper could be modified to add glue to foam mattress layers — and then adapted to add glue to fabric. Or to add something other than glue to some other kind of product.
“Once you build something and then go on to the next and the next, you can keep building off it like building blocks,” says Van De Hey, who founded C3 in 1994.
With a team of engineers, he and partner Marv Wall, vice president of business, have made dozens of such connections and associations, leading the machinery producer from paper making to other industries such as foam, automotive and food and beverage. C3 works with industry leaders including Schreiber Foods, Neenah Paper, Versa Paper, Future Foam, Pacific Urethanes, Brooklyn Bedding and other top national producers of foam products. It sells machines throughout North America and other parts of the world, including China.
In the 1990s, 80 percent of C3’s business was in the paper industry. Now it’s 10 to 15 percent, Van De Hey says.
C3’s ingenuity led to a 2015 Insight Innovation Award for the development of both its CWU2000 foam compression machine for mattresses and its Smart Identity Tracking system, a type of smart labeler.
The company also expects to see 20 to 30 percent growth over last year.
Invented by C3 in 2014, the CWU2000 can squish foam products into more compact and easily packable and transportable size. The compressed mattress is secured with its own special film. Once the product is unwrapped, it pops back into its original shape.
On a tour of C3’s floor, Van De Hey points out a stack of rectangular foam mattresses. “If I fill the truck up (with those), I might only have four or five thousand pounds of weight,” he says. “Well, I can haul 40,000 pounds down the road. So if I can fill that truck up 10 times more and load it down, I’m more effective.”
Again, why pay to ship air?
Darrell Nance of Pacific Urethanes in Ontario, Calif., discovered C3’s compression machine at the International Sleep Products Association expo in New Orleans and has been using it for about six months.
“It was kind of the buzz at the show,” Nance says. “We thought it was probably the most innovative way to package a mattress. Our Internet bedding business continues to grow, and we decided it would be a good addition to our existing equipment.”
Automation to OEM
“I had to learn a lot about a lot of different machine manufacturers,” Van De Hey says. “This area is very rich for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), so I got to see all the mechanical design, I got to see how people function. I probably was in 20 different OEM doors and worked personally with them.”Van De Hey, who has a background in electronic engineering, launched C3 (then called Control Concepts Corporations) in 1994. He had been doing controls integration — converting electronic language on machinery made overseas — for the paper industry.
The economy took a hit after 9/11 and “it kind of forced us to do other things, so we couldn’t just be an automation house,” he says. In 2002, C3 added its own mechanical staff so it could build the machinery itself.
“Our cheese sort of moved,” says Van De Hey, referencing the business book. “We had to be more agile, so we couldn’t just be in paper. We started diversifying into some things and focusing on where we wanted to be, and we added mechanical staff, and pretty soon we added our own product line. That really helps us long term.
“I don’t say I’m really a cheese guy, or I’m really a foam guy,” Van De Hey adds. “I’m really good at creating new products, so I have these applications that can help you.”
That industry diversity has become key to C3’s success. Van De Hey prefers to have several projects going at once — something he calls the 10/50 rule. The basic tenet is that it’s smarter to invest $50,000 in each of 10 projects rather than $500,000 in one.
“You can have too much passion, and you can have tunnel vision, and what happens is you overinvest. If it flops, then you’re in trouble,” Van De Hey says. “It’s important that you have more than one thing so you don’t lose sight of everything around you.”
Laminations Great Northern Corporation enlisted C3 a few years ago to help upgrade its machines and make them more versatile.
“He tries to look beyond the current project into what this could become — what are the possibilities for expanding beyond the project you’re working on?” says Gary Weber, vice president of manufacturing at Laminations. “The vision is probably what sets him apart.”
Springing into the foam industry
Need is what led C3 into the foam industry. A foam mattress industry leader had a laminating problem. A contact from the laminating industry approached Van De Hey and said, “‘You know, Joe, this might be a good one for you,’” he says. “I came back a month later and said, ‘This is the way I would do it.’ I laid out the room, had pictures of everything, I had all these models, and he bought it on the spot. That was my first foam project.”
The project involved fully automating a laminating line, gluing together a four-layer mattress every 30 seconds. There are only two of these machines in the entire world, says Mark DesJardin, business development and marketing coordinator. “It put us on the map in the foam world.”Need is what led C3 into the foam industry. A foam mattress industry leader had a laminating problem. A contact from the laminating industry approached Van De Hey and said, “‘You know, Joe, this might be a good one for you,’” he says. “I came back a month later and said, ‘This is the way I would do it.’ I laid out the room, had pictures of everything, I had all these models, and he bought it on the spot. That was my first foam project.”
That was in 2004. C3 later found its way into the automotive industry in much the same way, through a sales team member who worked with Marinette’s KS Kolbenschmidt, which needed a pick-and-place machine.
At any given time, C3 might have nine or 10 or 17 projects underway on the floor. One of them is a new gantry system that will help bi-directionally pick and place heavy blocks of foam.
“You can’t find anything like this on the market — it’s the first of its kind,” Van De Hey says. “Hopefully, we’ll sell 10 of them in the next year.”
C3’s Smart Identity System, also launched in 2014, operates through a web-based application, letting workers create streamlined, accurate labels that vastly improve the marking system on a manufacturing floor.
It’s a relatively small investment for a company — the labeler might cost $20,000 or so. But “dumb labelers” sometimes have a high failure rate, causing a delay that affects millions of dollars’ worth of products, Van De Hey says.
“This is a product that I can put in any industry, so we’re not industry-dependent,” Van De Hey says. “So it could be in cheese. It could be in tissue, it could be in bedding — it could be whatever. Everybody needs a label.”
Growth and evolution
“When you get out on the floor in the production world, if it’s not perfect and it doesn’t run from day one, those operators will never accept that machine,” Van De Hey says. “It’s like driving a car off the lot and you have problems within the first 10 miles — you’re going to bring it back and you’re going to have that bad feeling forever.”C3 started in an office at the corner of Ballard Road and Highway OO, near its client Appleton Papers (now Appvion). Later it moved to Lynndale Drive and in 2005 it moved to its current location in the Appleton North business park along Interstate 41. Its offices are bright, decorated with colorful murals and accented with leftover machine parts — another innovation of Van De Hey’s. The building encompasses 7,500 square feet of office space and about 11,000 square feet of assembly floor, which is important to C3 because the client can bring in its material and test out the machines.
Van De Hey says to provide the best work for a manufacturing company, it’s necessary to understand what they did yesterday, what they’re doing now and where they’ll likely go in the future.
Farm to factory
Instead, he attended DeVry University in the Chicago area, earning a bachelor’s of science degree in electronics engineering. But the influence of the farm stuck with him, both in work ethic and in problem-solving skills.If land prices had been more affordable in the 1980s, C3 might never have happened. Van De Hey is the 12th of 15 children of Wrightstown dairy farmers — a pathway he had hoped to follow.
“You had to make do with what you had and you had to figure it out, otherwise it wasn’t going to get done,” Van De Hey says. “You learn how to tackle things: Say the power went out. You still had to milk cows, you still had to feed cows. There’s always something to be done, and you still had a schedule to meet.”
That kind of ingenuity led Van De Hey and his brothers to be entrepreneurs.
“Believe it or not, all of my brothers today are owners of their own
businesses,” Van De Hey says. Some of the brothers took over the farm. Two others started their own farm. One is in the roofing business. One is in insurance. All brothers live within a few miles of the family farm, and the sisters all live within the state.
One of his siblings, Lois Smits, followed him to C3 early on, wearing many different hats until landing her current position in customer and project management. “It’s been 21 years, but it’s exciting because it’s always a different market, a different avenue, a different piece of equipment,” she says.
Smits says her brother is great for leading C3 because of his enthusiasm for figuring out how to solve problems. “He wants to get his hands dirty — he wants to be involved,” she says. “The light bulb goes off so quickly. Customers tell him one thing, I can tell already, you just look at him and you can see the wheels are spinning.”
He also cares what his employees have to say about a project, she says. He surrounds himself with innovative thinkers; a walk through C3’s offices and floor turns up a lot of young faces. Each year the company brings in engineering interns from UW-Madison, UW-Platteville, MSOE and Michigan Tech who are ready to share their ideas.
C3 Project Manager Josh Vande Hey (no relation) is a UW-Madison graduate who interned at C3 and started last May. He says C3’s creativity, innovation and its people make it a success with its customers.
“The nicest part is being able to look back and say, man, we were really able to take that need that they have and put an answer to their need,” he says, “and now they’re doing so much better because of it.”
ON THE WEB
» To see the CWU2000 compression machine in action, visit: https://c3ingenuity.com/cwu2000/ and click on the image
