Fredonia facilities give wipes maker room to grow

Diamond Wipes, the California-based company that purchased the assets of Guy & O’Neill earlier this year, is now producing wipes in a portion of the company’s Fredonia facility.

Diamond Wipes is vacating Guy & O’Neill’s main facility at 200 Industrial Dr. but is renovating and using the company’s buildings at 617 Tower Dr. and 280 Industrial Dr. to create a campus for the firm.

This is Diamond Wipes’ third plant — the others are in southern California and Ohio — Kristin Voigt, people operations manager for Diamond Wipes, said.

It expands the company’s manufacturing capacity by 140,000 square feet, enabling the it to better serve existing and new clients while introducing new capabilities such as a fully automated liquid fill line for household and cleaning products to support growing product demand.

It also gives Diamond Wipes the capacity to grow its canister lines.

“This new location not only increases our production capabilities, but also represents another strategic Midwest location for our customers and suppliers,” Diamond Wipes CEO Steve Gallo said.

Gallo called the acquisition of Guy & O’Neill’s assets — everything from equipment, finished products, raw materials, formulas and intellectual property — a strategic move for Diamond Wipes.

“There was a lot of really good manufacturing equipment the company had,” he said. “A lot of good customers. We knew some of the assets would make us a stronger company.”

Once Diamond Wipes purchased the assets, he said, the company visited Fredonia and North Carolina, where Guy & O’Neill also had a plant, to determine which assets it could use and which it might sell.

“Once we got on the ground and realized the people and assets and customers, it was a little bit of a pivot,” Gallo said. 

Diamond Wipes decided to close the North Carolina facility but to retain some of the Fredonia operations with an eye to growing the business into the future, he said.

“If we grow back to half the size of Guy & O’Neill, that would be a victory,” Gallo said. “We’re trying to build back profitably in a more efficient footprint.”

That’s good news for Fredonia, where the community was caught by surprise last year when it learned that Guy & O’Neill, a cornerstone of Fredonia’s industrial community for almost 50 years, might close. 

Guy & O’Neill had entered voluntary receivership and announced plans to lay off its 196 Wisconsin employees and 102 North Carolina workers in December, but company officials continued to work to find an owner who would keep the facility going.

In January, Diamond Wipes purchased the company’s assets for $6.6 million at auction. 

Guy & O’Neill had been leasing its buildings, and Diamond Wipes decided to close the largest of these facilities — something it is in the midst of doing — and renovate and use the other two buildings.

The Tower Drive location had been an office facility but will now include a production area, Voigt said. The Industrial Drive location will be used for production and warehousing.

The new site officially opened on March 3, and is staffed with about 40 people, most of whom were previously employed by Guy & O’Neill, Voigt said.

Guy & O’Neill had employed more than 200 people, she said, adding most retired or found other jobs when the company closed its doors.

Diamond Wipes kept some Guy & O’Neill employees on from the start, “just to keep the lights on,” Voigt said, adding they have been working to empty the company’s main plant.

While Diamond Wipes has been running a couple production lines in Fredonia since it reopened the plant, it hopes to be running six lines by fall, Gallo said.

Diamond Wipes, which is headquartered in Chino, Calif., is the largest wet wipes manufacturer in the western United States and among the top six makers across the board.

Like Guy & O’Neill, Diamond Wipes does a lot of contract manufacturing for other brands, but also does some retail private lines as well.

Voigt said Diamond Wipes does a lot of specialized runs of products for other manufacturers.

While Guy & O’Neill had 140 stock-keeping units, or SKUs, in its product line, Voigt said, Diamond Wipes has about 600 SKUs.

“They do a lot more shorter, specialized runs,” she said.

The hope, she said, is that the company will be able to expand.

“Right now it’s essentially a start-up business,” Voigt said. “We are looking at this as definitely we’re likely to grow. We just have to scale it correctly.”