If you make a mess, Jeffrey Dorn will help you erase it.
And he won't leave any fingerprints to betray his presence.
Dorn's name does not appear on any of the hundreds of foam and rubber products his employees make. Neither does the name of the Buffalo-based company he launched in 1954, TMP Technologies.
From the little foam tip on the applicator for BIC's Wite-Out correction fluid, to the many varieties of the highly praised and hot-selling Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, TMP Technologies has helped to develop and now manufacture products sold under the name of other companies.
Early on, in an age when companies had names instead of letters, it was Truly Magic Products. It made the foam applicators for the then-new generation of shoe polishes that came as a liquid instead of a paste. The product line expanded and took many forms, for a time consisting largely of the small and smaller rubber and foam pads, rollers, wheels and drums found in fax machines, copy machines and computer printers. But, Dorn said, that market dried up in recent years as his customers -- manufacturers such as Xerox, IBM and Kodak -- discontinued certain product lines and moved the production of others to Asia, too far away for his Western New York facilities to supply.
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"Like most manufacturers in the U.S., we have to struggle to find new opportunities and stay alive," Dorn said.
TMP and its subsidiaries, Advanced Rubber Products, Foam Sciences and TRS Packaging, have found opportunities that include products used in health care and in the electronics field, where customers need cleaning devices, tools and surfaces that can be sterilized, that are durable and that won't give off any lint or fuzz that could infect an incision in an operating room, contaminate the manufacture of delicate electronic devices or scratch silicon wafers.
TMP also makes, or makes parts of, breathing equipment for firefighters, insulation materials for electrical transmission equipment, sponges, swabs and brushes for home use and for arts and crafts. It supplies the foamy bits for stamp pads, brushes and rollers sold by Crayola.
TMP shares the patent on the foam applicator for Wite-Out, added to the product in 1999, a fact that was key to maintaining that relationship, and manufacture of the tips at a factory on Buffalo's Bailey Avenue, even after the rest of the product's production was moved from South Carolina to Malaysia.
But the product that helped TMP to explode again after a long period of retrenchment was the Magic Eraser.
Some seven years ago, people at Mr. Clean's corporate home, the Cincinnati-based consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, had a brainstorm for a light-weight, durable product that would handle most household cleaning tasks with a little water and less elbow grease. "Water-activated micro-scrubbers" the company calls them, crafted from large slabs of Basotech foam imported from Germany.
"It was centered around a particular kind of foam, made by BASF in Germany," Dorn said. "What they needed was somebody who could slice and dice and package it to their specifications. They talked to several companies here in the U.S. We were fortunate enough to get the contract."
Fortunate. And clever enough to present visiting P&G officials with a prototype cleaner that already had the image of Mr. Clean impressed into its surface.
"We've got a very talented group of engineers and designers," Dorn said. "It was a big undertaking for us."
The product started rolling off of TRS Packaging's lines in 2003, first in a facility in the building at Main and Rodney that has since become the Tri-Main Center, and soon after at a much larger facility that Dorn and company had to scramble to find and refit in order to keep up with P&G's exploding demand. All of the Magic Erasers sold in North America, which is about 90 percent of those sold world-wide, are made in the Buffalo facility.
The product has received rave reviews, including being listed as one of the "Coolest Inventions of 2004" by Time magazine.
"We're very agile and we react quickly," Dorn said. "You can't rest on your laurels."
Even though one of the company's more recent laurels is a Corporate Supplier of Excellence award from Procter & Gamble.
Seven production lines now turn out five varieties of Magic Eraser at a former beer distribution warehouse on Dingens Street, a building that had to be quickly equipped with custom-made machines, machines that need to be recalibrated whenever P&G, or its focus groups, decides it needs to be larger, smaller, denser or smell better.
"Everybody wants scents," Dorn smiled.
TMP not only has to satisfy Procter & Gamble's idea people, it also has to package and ship the Magic Erasers to suit the needs of the big-time retailers such as Target and, especially, Wal-Mart.
Dorn, "Buffalo born and bred," graduate of Canisius College and the University at Buffalo MBA program, is proud that he has been able to keep his company in the area, provide jobs for some 250 workers and do some $20 million a year in business.
He likes it here and his nephew, Kirk Dorn, liked it here enough to return and become TMP's director of business development after a decade in the beer distribution business in California.
"We've got a commitment to the city," Jeffrey Dorn said. "We try to hire locally and add value to the community."
e-mail: gpyle@buffnews.com
