Business View Magazine | January 2020

82 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JANUARY 2020 AT A GLANCE CLARKE PRODUCTS, INC. WHAT: A manufacturer of shower and bath products WHERE: Colleyville, TX WEBSITE: www.clarkeproducts.com CLARKE Products, Inc. C larke Products, Inc. is a privately-owned, bathing product company that designs and manufactures innovative and sophisticated showers, bathtubs, sinks, wash basins, and whirlpool products in its 210,000-square-foot facility in Waco, Texas. The company, which, today, is the premier manufacturer of acrylic and solid surface bathing products, was founded in 1984, by Donald Clarke, who purchased a bankrupt whirlpool bath business and began his new venture by making acrylic shower pans and tubs. “The business grew over the years,” Clarke recounts. “In the early ‘90s, we began targeting private label OEM customers; we did a lot of private label work in those early years and still do, today. We made tubs for Whirlpool Corporation, DuPont’s Corian Division, and a lot of other manufacturers that have been acquired by other firms, such as Eljer, which is now part of American Standard. So, we continued on in the private label sector and that still represents the majority of our business with the somewhat hidden Clarke name.” “In 2014, we established a new division in the company called Clarke Architectural, and this was devoted, entirely, to solid surface products, which are different from the acrylic products that defined us up to that point,” Clarke continues. “Solid surface is, essentially, a cast product. It’s a resin, filtered with different kinds of filler like aluminum tri-hydrate, in our case, poured into parallel molds and cured with catalysts, and then further cured and matured with heating ovens. This was a relatively small SETTING NEW BENCHMARKS