Posted December 15, 2016

 

By Devin Steele (DSteele@eTextileCommunications.com)

 

GASTONIA, N.C. – Less than a mile off I-85 here sits the corporate headquarters of the largest yarn-spinning company in the United States and one of the largest in the world.

 

Take a right onto Cotton Blossom Circle, and you can’t miss it: You’ll see the company’s large, boll-like logo strategically planted in the foreground 100 or so yards away from the office. And, if you’re positioned just right, that art sculpture forms a circular frame around the building, whose atrium also intentionally resembles a cone of yarn.

 

For 16 years, it’s been an awesome sight to behold each morning for a number of company leaders and corporate employees who have spent most of their careers helping build Parkdale into one of the textile industry’s most admired and venerable companies.

 

Just ask them. Without expressing those arriving-to-work sentiments exactly, company leaders eTC interviewed spoke highly of a company that has served them well and, just as importantly, served their customers and communities well. Each has a different experience, a different perspective, a different perception of the company and what makes it successful, but a common thread runs through each conversation:

 

Parkdale is home. Parkdale is family. Parkdale is Parkdale – uniquely Parkdale.

 

Which is probably why most of them have made Parkdale their last or only career stop.

 

Beyond their personal predilections, these leaders used a number of superlatives to describe the company: Quality oriented. Customer focused. Technology driven. Innovative. Forward thinking. Lean. And more.

 

Indeed, Parkdale seems to have thrived and survived by living by those tenets, and, wrapped together, you might be able to sum up Parkdale’s success in one phrase: pursuit of excellence.

 

That mantra was ingrained in the Parkdale psyche by longtime company leader and industry legend Duke Kimbrell (1924-2014), who worked part-time at the company starting at age 14 and, after military service and college, would lead the company for several decades. And it has been extended and in many ways augmented by Kimbrell’s son-in-law, Parkdale President & CEO Anderson “Andy” Warlick.

 

Parkdale is one of the largest single consumers of U.S. cotton. The company has depended on a large and diverse supply chain and customer base that has shared in the company’s success. Parkdale employs people in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, Honduras and the Dominican Republic at 26 spinning facilities, a research center, warehouses and at corporate.

 

Parkdale uses airjet, Vortex, ring spinning and rotor systems to produce yarns, and is committed to industry-leading technologies, according to company leadership. And its commitment to state-of-the-art, quality monitoring systems, offline sample testing, conscientious attention to detail and cleanliness combine to guarantee a consistent yarn, they added.

 

Oh, and, shhh … don’t tell anyone – Parkdale leaders want to downplay this, for reasons explained later – but the company is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. And, given the U.S. textile industry’s topsy-turvy ride on a rocky road for years, this is a momentous achievement.

 

Especially given that the company has grown and expanded during this precipitous industry decline.

 

As a standout of great measure that is quietly marking its centennial anniversary, Parkdale has been named eTC’s 2016 Industry Champion. While company leadership would prefer to look ahead rather than back, it’s necessary to explore certain attributes, the embedded culture of change and proactive decisions based on expected market disruptions that have put the company in a position to start its second century on solid footing.

 

Bucking ‘tradition’

 

Indeed, Parkdale isn’t one to toot its own horn, even in its 100th year, according to Warlick. He made his case to eTC after reluctantly agreeing to be spotlighted as eTC’s Industry Champion, which he called an “honor.”

 

“It’s 100 years but we’re not making a big deal out of it because we don’t want our team to be looking in the rearview mirror,” he said. “We want them looking towards the future. We want people focused on the future in an uninhibited way, not reliant on traditions. Sometimes, tradition inhibits progress because people will be afraid to change what is perceived as tradition or how we do things.’ ”

 

If anyone knows the potentially crippling effects of “tradition,” it’s Warlick. At 27, he left Milliken & Co. to join Parkdale. At Milliken, a company well ahead of its time in this industry, Warlick was learning and embracing many quality management and process improvement principles. And he often encouraged Kimbrell to implement some of these groundbreaking methods.

 

Kimbrell hired his son-in-law to bring those fresh ideas and knowledge to Parkdale. But trying to change some of the longtime company veterans was tough.

 

“You had the old guard saying, ‘son, that won’t work. I’ve been in this business for 30 years and we tried something like that before and it didn’t work,’ ” Warlick recalled.

 

But, with 100 percent support from Kimbrell, Warlick said he was able to break through that “I’ve-been-in-this-business-forever” mindset and make a number of changes that enabled the company to soar in the late 1980s and 1990s, according to several members of his executive team.

 

“One of the biggest mistakes the textile industry made was having a lot of guys who had been around 30 years or more and didn’t want anything to change,” Warlick said. “Some really only had five years of experience – they spent the next 25 protecting what they learned the first five years instead of continuously learning all the way through. Hard to be innovative, you cannot grow, you cannot think about change with that type of mentality.”

 

For instance, Warlick recalled, lower quality was often accepted when a plant was experiencing what personnel referred to as “one of those dog days.” Barre (repetitive yarn direction streaks) was the biggest quality defect problem in the spinning industry in the 1980s. He soon realized that these issues weren’t being addressed properly, if at all, he said.

 

“We didn’t have data, and we weren’t monitoring anything,” he said. “We would run badly, and not know why. What had changed? What do our cotton mixes look like? Our managers would say, ‘well, you’re going to have some barre.’ They accepted this is as part of being in the yarn business. Nobody had ever said, ‘no, it isn’t acceptable.’

 

“We had to start asking, what’s the temperature and the humidity in the room? Did it spike? Do we have the ability to measure that? And then you’d look at cotton laydowns. What changed? Let’s get the data. Let’s look at what’s in every bale, then let’s figure out a system where we can guarantee that we have a tighter range on those bales.”

 

The expressed need for data management and measurement led to the company’s opening what it called its Fiber Distribution Center, which it began trialing in 1988. By putting in a system where laydowns could be controlled at every plant, barre was eliminated by about 70 percent practically overnight. That system became a model in the industry, and soon, other companies visited Parkdale to learn about it and implement their own version.

 

That was a pivot point for several game-changers Parkdale would install in the next several years – something that may not have occurred had the company held on to “tradition.”

 

Warlick acknowledged that, had he not been Kimbrell’s son-in-law, he would have never been able to push through some of the changes that were necessary because “some of our managers at that time didn’t exactly embrace changes coming from someone half their age.”

 

Forming a new team

 

In order to help implement some of his ideas with as little pushback as possible, Kimbrell gave Warlick the green light to bring in his own team – several of whom he knew embraced new things because they were learning them at Milliken & Co. Dan Nation, Lee Thomas and John Nims, among others, would all soon join Parkdale – and remain today as part of the company’s executive team.

 

“We knew we couldn’t grow unless we built a team,” Warlick said.

 

They came for different but similar reasons, summed up in one word: “opportunity.”

 

“I came to Parkdale as a plant manager and, at age 29, I was running a business,” said Nation, now president of Parkdale International and president of SpunLab Performance Yarns. “The culture of the company is that you’re made to feel like an owner of a business. And you were given wide leeway to make decisions to run your business.”

 

For Nims, the decision to join a growing company with a “vision” was easy, he said.

 

“Parkdale wanted to hire a 32-year-old plant manager for the future,” said Nims, now president of Parkdale division U.S. Cotton. “I felt like I had an opportunity here to move up through the organization. Andy had a vision of what he wanted to make the company and, obviously, his vision has paid off.”

 

Thomas said he was impressed by the rate of Parkdale’s growth through acquisition and wanted to be a part of an expanding firm.

 

“It was a growing company in the ’80s and was starting to really ramp up exponentially,” said Thomas, currently Parkdale’s vice president of Services who was hired as a vice president to oversee several plants, including its then-latest acquisition, Belmont Heritage. “I was brought in partially to help convert our newly acquired plants into Parkdale plants.”

 

When he finally had his new team in place, Warlick told them not to easily trust anyone with years of experience who said something won’t work.

 

“The old saying was ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t break it.’ Well, it was broke,” Warlick said. “They just didn’t know it. And when we heard guys say that, it would infuriate us. We would say, ‘you know, if it ain’t broke, break it and make it better.’ We were young, impatient and being told we were in a dying industry! We had no choice but to embrace change.”

 

‘Radical’ changes lead to success

 

Once Warlick’s team was in place, the work began to implement a number of changes he believed were necessary in order for the company to stay on an upward trajectory.

 

In addition to the Fiber Distribution Center, quality issues were also addressed through what Warlick called a “radical” idea. That is, to put a scientist in charge of the cotton area instead of the “cotton man” that every yarn company had, the person who knew everything about buying and trading cotton and the qualities of the fiber – but not necessarily how it would perform.

“Gene Frye was running our lab and I made him the cotton man here,” Warlick said, “and you wouldn’t believe the uproar over that, how stupid I was, the village idiot. But we didn’t need a cotton man – we needed a cotton scientist, someone who understood how to blend cotton, how to buy it with specific characteristics that will perform on this piece of equipment or that piece of equipment on a consistent basis.”

 

Later, that would become something of the norm in the industry, when others started using Uster Corp.’s high-volume data (HVI) systems and other data measurement tools, he added.

 

“Gene put the science to it and that made our plants run a lot better and created a competitive advantage,” he said.

 

Parkdale was also one of the first textile companies to implement online data and camera monitoring, where, from what it called the “war room,” company leaders could see how a facility was running at any given day or time.

 

Another profound change instituted addressed the company’s issue with third-shift turnover, he said. During a tight labor market, the company was especially losing trained machinery technicians who were jumping at first-shift opportunities at other companies. And that left the company to train somebody else for the job.

 

So a restless night led Warlick to get up and walk through several plants in the wee hours of the morning. He gave it some thought and realized that turnover was costing the company probably more than it realized.

 

“We would hire somebody new and train them, and when they could get a first-shift job they would leave,” he said. “They were tearing up more than they were fixing while learning the job. You look at the expense, the parts on a machine – a million dollar piece of equipment – it didn’t make sense. We were training a greenhorn to fix something on the third shift and they would take five parts out to get the thing to work and they may need to take out only one. You start looking at your cost for maintenance and parts, and you find out how inefficient we were because it was hard to get someone trained that would stay on the third shift.”

 

So he decided to have technicians work only on first shift to reduce turnover and improve maintenance.

 

“What can break down on third shift that can’t wait until first shift to be fixed, unless a (Truetszschler) Blendomat goes out?” he asked. “If a card breaks, we have other cards. Let them fix it on the first shift, where they know what they're doing and they’re not going to leave for another job on first shift down the street. Then our maintenance got better, our machines ran better and quality got better.”

 

Other changes involved technology and processes. For instance, when Parkdale built its Magnolia Plant in Hillsville, Va., it was the first yarn production company to use large cans for yarn packaging. And it implemented “smart layouts,” where cans were lined up like soldiers and carding and drawing were positioned together to reduce transport distance.

 

And related to packaging, instead of using standard, 32-pound cans, it started using cans to accommodate 50 pounds of sliver, meaning fewer change-outs.

 

“We haven't been afraid to try new technologies and systems,” Warlick said. “We're large consumers of new technology and we work with all the new technology providers."

 

To wit: At Magnolia, Parkdale had supplier Saurer Zinser build a heavier-than-standard, 9-pound roving bobbin that is transported through the machines on monorails, reducing labor. The company also had Truetszschler develop a sliver packaging system the provided for better flexibility, he added.

 

Preparing for ‘battle’

 

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, Parkdale would continue to grow through acquisition, snapping up a number of smaller companies. But Warlick and his father-in-law began to see ripples in the water as the Walmart low-price model and the Asian financial crisis began to cause major disruption to the status quo – this on the cusp of China’s admittance into the World Trade Organization.

 

Charles Heilig, now president of Parkdale, Inc., didn’t know what to think when, on his first day with the company in 1998, he and other company leaders were presented a military helmet.

 

“The message basically was, ‘get ready and prepare: We’re getting ready to go through tumultuous times,’ ” Heilig recalled. “Andy was helping us prepare as a team to make it through the battles and the wars of industry shifts. We were ahead of the curve and prepared ourselves, and it allowed us to survive market downturns in a more favorable manner.”

 

And, indeed, the company weathered the storms by continuing to invest in technologies and doubling down on its quality and customer service focus, Heilig said.

 

Now, nearly 20 years later, Heilig said he is fortunate to be a part of such an innovative company with such a visionary leader.

 

“I enjoy working for a company that expects nothing less than my best every day and for a company that continues to teach me to be a better leader. Andy gives you the opportunity to learn and you’re constantly being pushed for new, better, innovative, lower cost, constantly pushing for excellence.”

 

During the industry’s contraction, Parkdale expanded into Mexico and Colombia, and later added more capacity and capabilities with the acquisition of Avondale plants in South Carolina and Alabama in 2006. Then in 2008, the company expanded into a new realm with the purchase of U.S. Cotton, the dominant supplier to almost every major U.S., Mexican and Canadian retail chain of private label cotton-based consumer products. These products include swabs, cotton balls, rounds and square pads.

 

In 2009, Parkdale acquired Hanesbrands’ spinning plants and many others, becoming the largest cotton spun yarn manufacturer in the world.

 

More recently, the company bought spinning plants from Fruit of the Loom last year and created specialty yarn division SpunLab early this year.

 

“By doing the right thing, by creating the right value for our customers, by working hard to outperform our competitors, we were able to survive,” Heilig said. “Sometimes, it’s just that simple. But working for a company that allows us to do the right things and allows us to compete in an open market is a refreshing feeling.”

 

Heilig referenced Parkdale’s Guiding Principles, framed on the wall in it lobby. Among the eight points, the last one is “Compete.”

 

“That’s really a simple Guiding Principle, but it speaks volumes about what we try to do here,” he said. “And, on that note, the one thing that we take very, very seriously is quality. And when a customer calls us and says they have an issue, we want it solved and solved now. There is no tomorrow when it comes to that because the competition is just too stiff.”

 

As the company changed to adapt to market conditions and demands, its product line has, as well. The amount of polyester and other synthetic fibers it produces has grown exponentially over the past quarter century, aligning with apparel consumption trends, Warlick said.

 

“We’re running more polyester today than we’ve ever run and we’re embracing that,” he said. “We started up a new, more fashion-oriented, more technical-oriented yarn business (SpunLab) because our customers need us as a resource to bring new ideas, to bring new products. We must to continue to do that. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to be a low-cost producer of commodity products. We will. But we have to run other products in which we can have a leadership position.”

 

Undoubtedly, Parkdale’s success over the years would not have been possible without the support of its suppliers, most of them longtime partners, Heilig said.

 

“We have tight bonds with a good number of our suppliers who we not only consider suppliers, but extensions of our organization,” he said. “And we treat them as such. We hold them in very high regard and we have incredibly high expectations for them in regards to new product development, innovation and performance. In some categories, we very, very rarely change supplier bases because if there’s an issue in that supply chain, we would rather stay with them and work through it rather than put it out for bid because we know that over the long term, that solid foundation will work better for us.

 

“So when we go into these major projects, they know what we want,” he continued. “They know if we have shortcomings, they’re able to help recognize them and resolve them before any major investments are made. It allows us to transition assets faster than we ever could in an open-model system.”

 

A team that lifts each other up

 

Heilig described Parkdale as a “truly a family,” with a culture of caring and unity not seen in many companies.

 

“We are going to help each other and lift each other up,” he said. “We don’t have space for poor performers, so with that in mind, everybody knows that when somebody is struggling, we don’t look at it with a crab pot mentality and hope he goes down so I get more. Everybody has this mentality that we’re going to hold hands together and we’re going to win. And it works. People stay here because of that. There’s not a lot of infighting at this company.”

 

Thomas agreed, calling the leaders and associates “very close knit.”

 

“We watch each other’s back,” he said. “When there’s a problem, we’re all rushing to help. And to me, that comes from the top. We work as a team. We back each other up.”

 

For a company its size, its corporate staff is lean – “so lean, it hurts at times,” Thomas said, laughing. Only about 100 people work at the headquarters to support its thousands of employees.

 

“We all have full-time jobs, but there are not a lot of layers in between to dilute things,” he said. “If Andy wants to know something, he might pick up the phone and call the plant manager, where at other companies the top leader might go through the chain of command.”

 

Nation added: “When I came to Parkdale, I was astounded by how lean it was, how decisions were pushed down as far as they could into the management structure. It’s one thing that makes it flourish. Decisions are made quickly. I had never seen a company that could make a decision so quickly and move so fast. And that’s a big key to Parkdale’s success. We may not always make the right decision, but if we make the wrong decision, we fix it, learn from it and move on.”

 

And now, nearly 30 years later, Nation said joining Parkdale was the best career decision he ever made.

 

“My blood runs green because this company is my family as well as my job,” he said.

 

Approaching age 60 with 32 years of experience at Parkdale, Warlick looks back with pride at the team he built and the successes they have shared through forward-looking, innovative strategies.

 

“I am really proud of our team, and I think Duke would be, too. I’m proud of what we have accomplished working together,” Warlick said. “Today, John Nims, Dan Nation, Lee Thomas and I are all those guys with over 30 years’ experience (approaching 40). I’m pretty sure that they would tell you that we all understand that we aren’t here to get in the way or be the guys not wanting to change. If Charles, Tad (Rogers), Jon (Marr), Dan (Morrison), Shane (Hamrick) or Davis (Warlick) ever hear any of us say, ‘Son, I’ve been in this business for 38 years and I tried that 25 years ago and it won’t work!,’ it’s time for us to go home.”

 

Related blog: Kimbrell, Warlick dynamic served Parkdale well