Business View Magazine | June 2022

43 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 6 million sq. ft) is in Brownwood in west Texas and they are a significant factor in the state economy. That being said, we were only closed down for half a day during COVID. We were pretty lucky in that regard.” The biggest challenge for Clarke Products has been the extraordinary shortage of key components over the last 16 months. Right now, they are terribly short of resin – the building block of the business. “If you look at all the components we buy and use in manufacturing, polyester resin is the single biggest item that defines us as a manufacturer,” says Clarke. “We’re paying 250 times the price we paid 15 months ago but the worst part is that we can’t get CLARKE PRODUCTS INC . enough. It comes from refineries, mostly on the Gulf of Mexico where they were affected by the Feb. 2021 storm that hit Texas. A lot of those refineries never came back online to the extent they were at before and several of them closed permanently. So there’s been a reduction there, but also the chemicals that go into the resin are used in virtually anything that’s made of plastic, or coated in plastic, or rubber products. So there’s just this tremendous demand worldwide.” The consensus in the industry is that people being at home so much during COVID started doing upgrades and there has been a tremendous demand for residential products of various types. With the supply shortage, Clarke