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Company
Profile > In The Beginning
In
The Beginning
Out
of the ashes
Whitford
Corporation was founded in 1969.
Two
friends, former classmates, had been working at the same company
for several years. Suddenly, three days before Christmas, both were
fired.
They
went to lunch. It was a long one. By the time they finished coffee
they had decided to start their own business. They had no clients;
no products to sell; all they had was a dream.
Today,
that dream has become Whitford Worldwide.
It's
an unusual company. This, briefly, is its story.
Tomorrow
, the world
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Where
it all began:
Whitford's first home in
West Chester, PA.
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Soon
after the two founders of Whitford Corporation opened for business,
they hired a third friend (and former classmate), equally entrepreneurial
in bent. After completing a project in the United States, he returned
to his native England. Six months later, he opened Whitford Plastics
Ltd. in Cheshire.
From its very beginning, Whitford has taken a global approach to
its business; a point of view that has been key to what success
the company has enjoyed.
Our
first product: still going strong
March of 1969 witnessed the creation of Whitford's first product:
Xylan 1010, a matrix coating based on an alloy of engineered polymers.
We sold a grand total of five gallons to Xomox Corporation for use
on valve actuators. It was designed specifically to solve two problems:
- Provide
a tough, very low-friction film that could withstand the constant
wiping of a rubber seal.
- Capable
of being cured at temperatures sufficiently low to avoid blistering
or distortion of the casting of the actuator housing.
It
worked, and Xylan 1010 remains one of our most popular products
today.We
had launched the first of a series of products designed to compete
with the goliaths of the high-performance coatings industry.
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