Meet the Manufacturers (Bevin Bells)

But one of my favorites is, of course, the cowbells were featured during the Saturday Night Live's famous More Cowbell Sketch featuring Will Ferrell. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to YouTube that immediately. It's very funny. And also Bevin bells have been used by the Salvation Army for the Holiday Street Collections and even the New York Stock Exchange closing gong. Who knew bells could be so far reaching in and such a fabric of my life and I never even knew?

I'm excited to find out some more. So, Cici, welcome to Meet the Manufacturers, the podcast.

Thank you, Claire. I'm happy to be here.

it's great to have you here and what an incredible history you have. So tell me a little bit about the story behind your company's founding and what pivotal moments, I guess, have shaped where it is today.

Bevin Brothers Manufacturing, and very quickly two other brothers joined. One of those brothers was my triple great grandfather Bevin. So he was one of the four brothers. And the company, you know, back then made sleigh bells and, you know, all kinds of bells. But ⁓ it was back in the day before the electronic bell, there was a massive variety of bells made and very, very high volume and

Wow.

the introduction of the electronic bell, which completely changed the landscape of bells and how people use them and why they use them, to then foreign imports and battling offshore competition, which was new. now today we're dealing with everything from supply chain issues and all of that and still working diligently to keep bells as a relevant part of people's lives.

I was just thinking about bells in my lifetime and I remember distinctly throughout my infant school and junior school. when I was a little guy, teacher always brought us in from play with the bell and it was a real privilege to ring the bell to let all the children know it was time to come in.

No, I was just gonna say, I can't tell you how many people have stories like coming in for dinner because my mom's the bell on the back porch and the teacher bell bringing people in and everybody has major associations with bells and bells ringing and it's a big feature in a lot of films that bells are always marking something, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

They really are.

And my childhood was marked by obviously the village church and their bell. obviously being a Brit, we happen to have this clock called Big Ben and the actual bell, the Big Ben bell is pretty special to us. Okay. Let's talk leadership because you're the big boss, you're the president. So tell us a little bit about your current role. What does your day actually look like and what would most people be surprised to learn about your day?

Right.

Well, obviously my day is extraordinarily varied. And I think that's probably true for anybody in a leadership role. So you're dealing with everything, you know, from materials and finance and operations and human resources and staffing and all of that. My week is very different because I work from home on Mondays and Fridays and I'm in the factory generally Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

That's because I live in Massachusetts and my factory is actually in Connecticut. So when I'm in the factory, I am much more hands-on engaged. I'm on the floor a lot. I'm in the office with my staff a lot. I think people might be surprised to see me out, you know, picking up or sweeping or doing other things of, you know, trying to model the behavior that I'm looking for and what's important in terms of maintaining the facility and keeping things ship-shape. So.

I do it all.

something that in the previous season of Meet the Manufacturers that so many family-owned manufacturing businesses, it's all hands on deck quite often and leading from the floor is quite a common theme. So tell us a little bit, I mean you've got a long, long history. Tell me a little bit about the culture and values within the

Well, we are a family company and saying that I feel as though the culture within our company, well, it's not extensively Bevin family members. We have a ton of family members. We have sisters and husbands and wives and mothers and sons and cousins. And it's a very, very collegial tight group. As a result, find our employees tend to have quite a long tenure. You know, one of our employees famous sayings when the

factory burned down and there was the question, are we going to be able to rebuild? And he looked at my cousin, he said, yo, this is my home. And that's a sentiment that I think is shared by certainly some employees, I'm not going to say every employee, but I think it's a really, I love our employees and I love our group of employees. And it's a very diverse group. have people from everywhere from,

Guatemala and Germany to Bosnia and Africa, just you name it, we've got employees from all over the world. hang a flag of each country representing each country that every employee feels allegiance to. And we love that as well.

adapt and adopt, you know, new technology and things that are going to help improve the ⁓ throughput of our company while still keeping obviously the quality. I'm pretty committed to our employees and trying to keep a company that's good for employees to work in. not looking to become all robotic or all automated. We're also a very high mix, low volume manufacturer. So

makes automation and robotics much more challenging when you have that. So the human touch is very valuable. But I think what's going, we changed as a company in the early days from casting our bells, where you're actually melting the metal and you're pouring it into molds and it's much slower and much more ⁓ challenging. Now we stamp our bells so we don't do any more casting and that's much more high volume.

and ⁓ allows us to produce at a greater volume.

When did you change from casting to stamping?

I have to say that I am so proud to have a company in Connecticut these days. And I don't know that people were always saying that. And I think maybe not even that many years ago, it was viewed as quite challenging. And I think that the environment that we're working in now and the support that the state of Connecticut has given to us through the office of manufacturing and even just creating something like that and the funding. So we're able to make investments and

upskill our workers with help from the state of Connecticut. So we've just invested in a massive digitalization program where we're digitizing all of our production and it's all getting captured as data that's going to help us track and plan and then reduce bottlenecks and all of that. That was funded 30 % by the state of Connecticut to help us bring that on board. Then training and upskilling all of our workers to manage

working with tablets and having to enter everything in tablets and how all of that works. I these are monumental shifts for a company like ours and all of that was made possible by ⁓ partnership with Connecticut and funding that comes through that.

That's great to hear and it leads me on perfectly to the next question, which is about technology and innovation. Which emerging technologies have the biggest real-world impact on your operations right now?

Well, I think this ability to quickly with tablets and software and software that's been specifically developed for our company to be able to track our workflow and the ability to look at how we make things and the order in which we make them and be able to take that and turn it into data that is able to be then interpreted. I'd say, and I'm sure AI plays a big.

part of that, right? But it's all being developed for us specifically. data and analytics and data collection for us right now, we haven't stepped into robotics or automation. This is kind of the first step for us.

That's awesome. So talking about workforce, now one of the things that I used to hear a great deal on this podcast was the difficulty in getting new talent into manufacturing, you know, initially, but also when people do get into a manufacturing career, it seems to be much less churn, much less, you know, turnover of staff.

So talking about workforce challenges, what are the biggest talent or skill gaps that you're facing right now and how are you addressing them?

Well, oddly enough for companies like mine, sadly, the biggest gap is actually tool and die makers, which is a really old fashioned job, not a new job. Because when you have a company like ours that operates with a lot of dyes and tools and those cannot be properly maintained or new ones created, it's a real gap. And so all of the hands on people, those sage old Yankees that, you know, love to tinker and work with their hands and that kind of thing. I mean, all of us that

that do that kind of work when we get together in a group, we're all like, my God, we really missed the tool and die guys. Because we're not a CNC machine and because we don't have all of the automation, I don't need the higher end CAD people and computer operators and that kind of thing. ⁓ I tend to, knock on wood, I tend to have less challenge attracting employees, I think, than some of my counterparts because I don't need that higher

level of education. You can come into my factory and we can teach you what you need to know. So it makes it a bit easier for me.

And then they stay and then you employ their aunt, their uncle, the nephew, and you end up growing your family more. ⁓

That's why I say it's not so hard for us to

find ⁓ people because if they're happy, then they want to bring their family members in, right? And they want to bring good people in because they don't want to mess it up, right? They don't want to bring in somebody bad for us. So we've had very, very good success with that. Yeah.

Of

Yeah, this is it.

I love that self recruitment. Love that. So you touched on earlier about supply chain, what lasting lessons did recent I guess global supply chain disruptions teach your organization? Were you affected at all by it?

We were dramatically affected by it during COVID, of course. And it really taught us, we, you know, I think so many organizations went to much more of a lean, you know, operation and just in time kind of stuff. I mean, not that we were really a just in time, but we were certainly a lot more lean on our raw material inventory. And what it taught us was that we carry a much higher level of raw material inventory, and we're not calling it down.

to the last minute because during COVID sometimes materials that we would have gotten before COVID would take us two weeks. We'd order brass and two weeks later we'd get the brass. And during COVID it might be six months, it might be. So we try to leave ourselves with probably in the neighborhood of four months of, we're never closer than four months in needing anything. And that's just a, it's a shift in the balance sheet, right? And a shift in the financials to

Wow. Yeah.

Yes.

to get yourself to that place. And then once you get there, it's a little bit easier to maintain. So we had to make some pretty significant investments to get there, but it's definitely been worth it.

Yep.

Yep.

And now you've got that buffer in place. Should anything ever happen again? Yeah. So we've touched on it already. Automation versus humans. How do you strike that balance between bringing in new technology and potentially some automation investment and retaining that critical human touch? Because it is a real human-centric product, isn't it?

Correct. Yeah.

Yeah, it absolutely is. But I will tell you that any equipment or other investments like that that we're making and that we're looking at, it is all to reduce the amount of physical labor needed. don't envision myself ever cutting back my workforce, but as we're adding stuff, and as we're growing, I'm hoping to grow through greater efficiency, through greater automation. We're working right now, interestingly, with a group from University of Connecticut, a senior capstone engineering

project to take one, two of our operations and meld them into a single machine that performs both operations. You know, that would cut the time down to 30 by 30%. If that works and they're on track, they're doing a great job. We have another one right now with Rensselaer Polytech, their senior cap stone project and, you know, similar kind of thing. They're working with us on a project to

⁓ fabulous.

Wow.

improve efficiency, improve throughput and those kinds of changes. So as we're changing and we're building new machines and we're increasing capacity, I'm hoping to do that through those kinds of methods.

That's awesome. That's really cool. Sustainability then, sustainability pressures. How important are environmental and sustainability targets in your strategic decision making today?

⁓ you know, I mean, candidly, I don't have a huge sustainability ability, I guess, to make major changes because, ⁓ you know, we recycle every, you know, we recycle all of our, you know, steel and all of that kind of stuff. We, you know, environmentally dispose of waste that is generated by our business. we, ⁓ you know, done all the energy efficient lighting and the, you know, on off kind of stuff to.

improve that. So we have made, you know, some improvements like that, but it hasn't, there's not a lot of areas other than I suppose adding solar panels on our roof, which we have not done yet, that kind of thing. We haven't made a lot of changes.

don't know, there's quite a few green credentials there, a few ticks on the resume. Thinking about your customer, how it's changed, I guess, and evolved over many, many decades now. But how are the customer demands changing right now, I guess, in this decade? And how is that reshaping the way you manufacture or deliver your products?

Okay.

Well, one of the things we haven't touched on yet in the discussion, because everybody thinks about us as Bevin Bells, but you know, we're actually Bevin Brothers Manufacturing. Bells is one of our lines, but another line is, well, I think it's right behind me here, Bevin Cylinders. You can possibly see that. 50 % of our business today is making compressed gas cylinders. And those are cylinders that are used, you know, sometimes for oxygen, breathing oxygen might be used in fire suppression.

⁓ They might be used for calibrating ⁓ gauges and stuff for calibration gas. our, and that happened because during the fire, we had a cylinder manufacturer renting space in our old factory. And when the fire happened, they didn't have the financial resources to come back from the fire. So we acquired them and acquired everybody in the operation and just merged the two companies into one company.

So that's obviously a huge change for the company historically. But when you look at the Bell business, customer base is absolutely fascinating, I think. mean, it's everything. People are always like, so you make Bells? Who buys Bells? Why is a Bell relevant? And they're always like, is it like a church choir Bell?

Wow, yeah.

⁓ I say, no, we make everything except that. That's a musical instrument. We do not make church bells for church choirs. But we, you know, our customers, every mine in the world has, is required to have a Bevin Bell as part of its safety protocol. So that when every other system in the mine fails and all the communication goes down and nothing is happening, somebody can run up to that bell and just ring it like crazy. And they're using.

the bell that is what we call a boxing bell used by Muhammad Ali and most of his matches and also the New York Stock Exchange. I mean, it's a very, very loud bell. So, you know, we send our bells all over the world to mines. Our bells are also used a lot in South America and Latin America on the guys ride the little bikes with food in the back and that little food cart. They use our, the bell we created for the good humor ice cream trucks. And we send those all over the world.

Wow.

Wow.

Our bells are huge for obviously road races and ski races, know, marathons, people are ringing bells all of the time. You see them at the Olympics, you see them, you know, absolutely everywhere. So they're a huge cheering device. The cowbell that used to hang on an actual animal out in the field, you know, now has a very different use today than it does in our agriculture business is obviously a tiny, tiny fraction of what it used to be now with electronic electric fences.

to keep animals in, the farmers no longer really need to have the bells. have ⁓ sleigh bells, or, you know, we used to have a catalog with 20 or more pages of different sleigh bells, sizes, configurations, a of what today we make three sleigh bells. We make a one and a half inch, a one and a quarter inch and a one inch sleigh bell. And you can get it with a hole or a loop. So I guess that's six bells. And, ⁓ but today our sleigh bells are used for,

Wow.

Poochy pets are the little doggie doorbells that hang on the door for a dog to ask to be let out, right? So that's a ⁓ big customer for us. But the biggest customer for us are trains that do the little Polar Express train rides at Christmas. And so, you know, we'll get orders like 40,000 bells and 50,000 bells and 30,000 bells to give to these trains for their little Santa rides. And I can't tell you how many hundreds of thousands of those we do. So just.

⁓ my gosh, yeah!

you know, a completely different business model. And then of course, there's the Christmas and the Christmas decorating and Christmas ornaments, which continues to be, you know, a huge, huge part of our business.

know what? It's absolutely fascinating. When I first thought, okay, I'm going to do an interview about bells. You know, I had to think, okay, bells, think bells, Claire. And I did my homework, but it's actually, it's woven into the fabric of our lives without us even knowing it. It's absolutely fascinating. It truly is. So talking about growth then, Christmas will always be Christmas. Santa's sleigh bells will always be Santa's sleigh bells. I guess the biggest growth area will be

Exactly. Yeah, it's absolutely true. Yeah.

with it will be within the cylinders or?

Well,

I think that ultimately probably that's what we've envisioned being our biggest area of growth and our biggest profit area. But we keep surprising ourselves with the bells, honestly, and just keep finding intersections with what's happening. A huge piece of our business right now is bear bells. Everybody's hiking, especially during COVID, everybody got out on the trails and got out on the mountain bikes and they all want bells to keep the bears away.

just made a little bell, put a bear on it and the thing's just blown up, you know, and everybody's buying the bear bells and they're for sale everywhere and they're putting, you know, Lake Tahoe and Grand Tetons and Glacier Bay Park on the bells and, you know, everybody can't get enough of the bear bells. So that's been a funny way, but it's been, you know, know, a really way to stay relevant. And so,

You know, currently our business has been sort of 50-50, but last year the Bells outpaced the cylinders, you know, in terms of the percentage of our business, you know, not by a ton, but they did. And so the growth was greater in the Bell category last year. This year with America's 250th anniversary, I can tell you that Bells are a massive opportunity for us, right? So again, staying relevant, we've got an entire line of Bells that have

the official America 250 logo on them. So hopefully people are going to be ringing their cowbells on July 4th and, you know, having other, we've got bells that you stick on the shelf with an eagle on it as a memento of the 250th. that's, you know, huge. And then the cylinders, we just continue to try to get new customers and expand that category.

It's amazing. And you always, always need more cowbell, always. So talking about sort of risk and resilience, you've had experience of this with the fire, of course, but thinking, thinking more now to the future, I guess, what keeps you awake at night as a manufacturing leader heading into this next decade, I guess,

Correct.

candidly, know, profitability is the thing that, you know, it's, it's very, very challenging when you don't know what tariffs are going to do to you when you don't know what your raw materials are going to do when, you know, labor, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of people who hear Connecticut's minimum wage and I know they're actually shocked.

you know, buy Connecticut's minimum wage. If you're like down in the South somewhere and you've got a $7, $8 minimum wage, you can't quite believe, you know, what we're paying in Connecticut. So trying to balance all of that while keeping costs competitive with your competition. And so just trying to sort of manage that, you know, manage all of those different inputs. I will tell you that we've, you know, the tariffs have delivered us a couple

you know, big pieces of business, you know, that people have brought their business on shore. And that's been great for us. We have another, you know, massive opportunity that we're looking at now strictly because the tariffs are making them come to us that would, you know, dramatically increase the size of our business if we win that piece of business. And that would be directly as a result of tariffs. So you manage

the best you can with as much information as you have and just not knowing what you're gonna be hit with next is kind of what keeps me up at night, I guess.

Yeah, it's a pretty fluid situation for sure. If you could be the boss, I guess, this is policy and regulation. What government policies or regulatory changes would you make or would most help you thrive?

I think that this investment that the state of Connecticut is making in manufacturing and to make investments like that in our small to mid-sized businesses in this country that ultimately form a lot of the backbone, right? You wouldn't have major aerospace without hundreds of small guys propping them up, right? And creating, you

the nuts and the washers and the whatever they need, right, for that. So keeping those mid to small size businesses competitive, up to date. So I think, you know, my wish would be that continued, especially on a national level, not just on a local level, that we see that kind of investment in American manufacturing at the small to mid size level, because I think

You know, we can look at all the big guys, but ⁓ if you're not supporting the small guys that are all underneath that, the chain's gonna fall apart.

Absolutely, Okay, advice for the next generation with all your wisdom. What would you say to a young person considering a career in manufacturing today?

To me, the biggest thing about manufacturing that I love is the soup to nuts. It's the front to back. You are seeing something that is just a ⁓ raw metal and you're then actually talking with and dealing with the consumer who's using that product at the end of the day. So it's the full cycle. And to me, that's so exciting to not just be, you know, necessarily one cog in one wheel. I love, I love that whole start to

to finish aspect of manufacturing. And I think that it uses all of your different brain power and brain skills from your creative thinking and your ability to communicate to your math and science side to problem solving. So in all of the things I've done in my life and my career, I think it's by far the most fascinating.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

so challenged on a year to year basis of just kind of riding that line of profitability. And, you know, I'd like to think that we're able to, we'll grow, but I think we probably can get there without necessarily doubling the workforce or doubling the physical plant or all of that. I think by being more efficient and more effective in how we do what we do, we can double the size of the company.

that way and then after that we can look at you know bigger plants and bigger people and all of that.

Well, I would look forward to that. Thank you.

to the fabric of our lives. I really do wish you and the business so much success in the future. And people, you all need bear bells.

And at 250,

America 250 bells too, right?

America 250

Correct.

I will be there and will be twice as big. Thank you.