Business View Magazine | December 2019

51 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2019 THE CHAMPLA IN CABLE CORPORAT ION American Super-Temp in 1963, and we went from a small, old mill building to the building that we are in now in Colchester, Vermont, which is 200,000 square feet. Right about the early-mid ‘70s, was when Champlain Cable became what we are, today, where we utilize compounding, chemistry, and the physics aspect of a radiation beam to cross-link our materials. That really gives us an advantage and separates us on how we can utilize wire and cable for applications and markets to solve problems. It’s a process that very few others do. This radiation technology created a new industrial market for us. Appliance and motor manufactures were looking for a wire that would last longer than the inferior wires they used in the past and Champlain Cable had the solution.” “As the ‘70s matured into the ‘80s, we also added data communication and telecommunication cables to our mix,” Reichert continues. “So, now we had an aerospace product line; we had an industrial product line; and a data and telecommunications product line, which was there to support the movement towards local area networks (LANs). As that marketplace exploded, in the mid-late ‘80s and into the early ‘90s, we were there to capitalize on our initiative. Also, as the NASA programs matured, we had a fair amount of business with the commercial aircraft business. “We made a decision in the 1990s to do two things: we exited the aerospace and commercial aircraft business and we entered the automotive market. The reason we did that was we saw a need and an opportunity for OEMs that were starting to look at hotter engine compartments and smaller spaces, where they wanted to add more accessories and more wires. And what was becoming very obvious was that traditional wire and cable solutions did not allow for some of those changes to take place without either rerouting wires to avoid hot spots, or not being able to put as many wires into the same or smaller space. So, with the materials