Petaluma plastics company serves as business model for adapting to pandemic

A nondescript white factory in east Petaluma houses a small manufacturer that could serve as a Harvard Business School case study of how to ride the treacherous pandemic wave by taking big risks to produce commercial plastic products in sky-high demand.

Architectural Plastics quietly had made a name for itself over 40 years in the Bay Area and around the country by designing and fabricating custom acrylic furniture, hospital trays and wine storage racks for celebrities. The customer list is long: a wine cellar for Paris Hilton; display cases for artwork at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and de Young Museum in San Francisco; and plastic displays for Apple when the tech giant introduced the first iPad.

None of that mattered much when the coronavirus struck the region, and it certainly wouldn’t have gotten the company — owned and operated by Blake Miremont and his wife, Virginia — through the public health crisis intact.

In March 2020 came the first bold move: At the suggestion of his wife’s sister, who worked in health care and saw the dire need for protective equipment, Miremont temporarily shifted his entire production to making face shields to protect hospital nurses and doctors from getting infected while treating COVID-19 patients.

Although the company never made the shields before, Miremont dug in and began the tough task of ordering from global suppliers all the acrylic sheets he could get his hands on. Architectural Plastics ended up producing and selling 100,000 of the face protectors, including 20,000 to Kaiser Permanente medical centers.

“That was the start,” said Miremont, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who took the CEO baton in 2016 from his dad, Pierre, the company’s founder and still minority investor. Indeed, it was only the beginning of the wild, unpredictable 2020.

By midyear, the company pivoted again as retailers, hospitals, supermarkets, banks and other businesses deemed essential during the pandemic needed plastic barriers for inside to protect employees from consumers who might be transmitting the dreaded virus.

Architectural Plastics responded by making acrylic barriers called sneeze guards for companies all over California and several nearby states.

Last year turned out fortuitously to be a banner one, as the company went through over 10,000 4-foot by 8-foot sheets of quarter-inch acrylic mainly to fabricate face shields and the sneeze guards.

That’s four times the annual supply, weighing in at around 240 tons.

“It really was just a gamble that I placed,” Miremont said, as he spoke on the buzzing floor of the 16,000-square-foot plant. recalling his determined push for acrylic.

He ended up buying nine months’ worth of the thin clear acrylic — “as much money as we had, it all went into the quarter clear” — thereby locking in prices at the time of purchases.

“I didn’t know acrylic guards were going to be a thing, at all.”

He had to pay upfront, though, when he ordered the sheets, so it really was going to be boom or bust for the company. Either, have the 13-person team work long hours seven days a week fabricating plastic products vital to saving lives during the public health nightmare or go down as a casualty of the pandemic.

“Had I not fought to get all of the material in here, we would have gone bankrupt, certainly,” Miremont recalled. “Or, I would have had to lay everybody off.”

After a frenetic 2020 paid off, the company has been called upon to design and make plastic dividers of a different sort. Customers from a national service dog training operation to technology companies are keeping the Petaluma enterprise busy fabricating an array of acrylic guards or barriers to suit redesigned workplaces.

Perhaps the most futuristic job underway calls for acrylic pods designed for one or two people to work inside. Miremont wouldn’t divulge the tech company client that’s ordered them because he agreed to a nondisclosure agreement, but the prototype is done and ready for the customer to review.

The pod’s sides are clear with white acrylic on top “so people don’t feel like they’re in a little box,” he said, noting it could be a multimillion-dollar project if the client ends up buying thousands of them.

The post-pandemic prospects for the next couple of years at Architectural Plastics partly will depend on how offices and other workplaces are reshaped.

Transforming the office

Kelly Dubisar, a design director in the workplace practice in the San Francisco office of architectural services firm Gensler, described what’s occurring in the office environment as “fairly dramatic.”

At the heart of it, Dubisar said, employers are converting the workplace from rows of assigned desks to a layout she called a “neighborhood” with a “free address” for employees when they are there.

Dubisar, who works with technology companies in the Bay Area and globally, said they are grappling with different percentages of employees returning to offices.

“The workplace is becoming an ecosystem of enclosed and open spaces allowing choices in when and how you work,” she said. “It’s really important that there is a place co-workers can come together.”

Dubisar predicted this period of “iterative experimentation” with workplace design and strategy would continue for at least another year before companies settle on a suitable office layout and workforce strategy that doesn’t diminish a healthy culture.

Stacey Walker, interior designer and principal at TLCD Architecture in Santa Rosa, said people now have a different mindset about their work surroundings.

“This is the first time we’ve all been sent home, and we’re coming back with a new perspective,” said Walker who works with North Bay health care, education and government employers. “And employers feel they have to listen more to workers about their needs.”

Michael Casolo, chief revenue officer at Unispace, a global workplace strategy, design and construction firm established in 2010, said employers should focus on three key accommodations for their staffs as they decide their post-pandemic office environment.

They are: worker safety (which is the most important), functionality and workplace culture.

Unispace, with 45 locations in at least 25 countries, offers companies strategic workplace consultation and design and then acts as a general contractor for customers that want to build office space. Most of its clients operate in the technology, financial and professional services and life sciences industries.

The future of the office, in Casolo’s view, is making it a place workers can do their jobs either full-time or part of the workweek and that can function as a third-party site for contractors. When it comes to allocating space, he said, many employers are devoting more of it to shared rooms for teams to meet, collaborate, train and develop and coach.

A key factor for companies is designing a workplace and maintaining a company culture for everyone, including “people not there so they can still be connected to the brand,” said Casolo, who is based in New York.

Global growth ambition

After Miremont and his 40-year-old wife, the chief financial officer, took over the production company, he set out to reconfigure it for modern, computerized manufacturing. Fortunately for the company, that painstaking work was nearly complete when the pandemic rolled in.

His father moved the plastics fabrication business from San Francisco to the Petaluma factory on North McDowell Boulevard in 1984. Back in the 1980s, the work was done by hand with 45 workers.

Now there’s a smaller, more highly skilled workforce using state-of-the-art fabricating equipment that Miremont intends to keeps adding for efficiency and to drive growth. The company’s annual revenues have been in the $3 million to $5 million range, increasing about 20% annually the past four years.

Miremont, who, like his dad, has a background in philosophy and mathematics, expects another new machine to arrive by year’s end. His next step will be to expand the production space.

He intends to forge into new global markets, and in five years, hopes to boost revenue to about $10 million a year, requiring a payroll of about 30 people.

“We’re really trying to be a globally dominant plastics manufacturer,” he said.

While plastics fabrication is the company’s sole focus, a diverse group of clients has allowed for plenty of creativity and innovation. There’s the display projects for Apple and Google; the acrylic wine cellar for Paris Hilton; and free-standing guards used as barriers for a biomedical client in the X-ray area. Among others, a San Francisco law firm recently turned to Architectural Plastics for products that are part of redesigning three floors of offices so people can work better in closed spaces.

The work for Hilton gave the company broad social media exposure after the hotel heiress posted pictures of her shiny wine cellar to her millions of followers on Instagram. That photo-driven social media channel also has become a valuable marketing tool for the business to post shots of fabricated projects on its own Instagram page with 14,000 followers.

Social and trade media, word of mouth and customer referrals are the main ways Architectural Plastics lands new projects. Miremont prefers it that way, saying his company operates as a “relationship” business with customers rather than pushing them to buy products.

Donating products and time

The pandemic has been a successful chapter for the company and it has presented opportunities to give back. To that end, over the past 12 to 15 months, the firm has given away many face shields, trained mom-and-pop operators that sprang up last year to capitalize on soaring demand for plastic barriers how to do basic fabrication.

Miremont said that he had acquired so many thin acrylic sheets that “we ended up being a resource in June 2020, when we were the only company on the West Coast that had acrylic.”

A key business lesson he can glean from the turbulent operating climate in the pandemic?

“Biggest thing I’ve found is, if we’re actually trying to do something good, the doors kind of open up for you,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Paul Bomberger at 707-521-5246 or paul.bomberger@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @BiznewsPaulB.