Today is our grand opening of our new building addition at Stern Rubber Company in Staples, Minnesota. Since 1969, Stern Rubber Company has been the only manufacturer of custom rubber products offering creative solutions and strategic partnerships to innovative companies in North America, who want to lead their industries in a fiercely competitive global market. Since moving to Staples in 1973, we have made a couple of additions to the 900 Prairie Ave Northwest main building and have added the extruded rubber building next door to the main location in Staples. Also we have added the Aitkin plant where we have rubber injection machines that produce gate valves for Waterous Company and American Valve & Hydrant. Our new addition added new offices so that all the staff will be under one roof, added a new area for the rubber deflashing and rubber trimming departments and added warehouse space for off-shore sourcing.
A ribbon cutting ceremony took place today led by our owner and Chairman, Terrel Stern, our CEO Bonnie Gastecki, our President, Bob Jackson and our Vice President of Operations, Sandy Mumm. The local newspaper “Staples World” was on hand to write a story about our new grand opening. In order to not lose valuable working days during the move, we worked nights and weekends to move everyone into their offices. We added new computer network switches and updated the network to better serve our customers. Stern Rubber Company has two floors of offices, with conference rooms on each floor, customer service, purchasing and administration is on the first floor and management and accounting are on the second floor; We have plenty of room to expand offices in the future. After moving our liquid nitrogen tank, we moved our cryogenic deflashing machines to their new location on the south end of the new addition. We also expanded the size of the trimming department which is now also located in the new building addition. We will move our quality assurance lab to the room that trimming once occupied and engineering/estimating will move the space currently occupied by QA.
The general contractor of our building is Hammers Construction who is based in Perham, Minnesota. Stern Rubber Company and Hammers Construction used local businesses to do the construction of our new addition, including Jordahl’s for the concrete, Giza Plumbing and Heating, Derek Holst Construction for the office framing and finish work, Minnesota Valley Irrigation for the electrical, and Brainerd Glass. We will finish our parking area around the new addition when the snow melts and the ground thaws, in addition we will also do some much needed landscaping around the building as well.
Stern Rubber Company is known for rubber molding, rubber to metal bonding, extruded rubber, compression molding, transfer molding, rubber injection molding and rubber compounding and milling its own raw rubber. Our customers know us for our on time delivers, our quality and excellent customer service. With the increased space added by the new addition we will only perform better to meet all our customer’s needs. the new addition we will only perform better to meet all our customer’s needs.