Fosta-Tek celebrates 5th anniversary

By Christine Guilfoy
Telegram & Gazette Staff

LEOMINSTER - John M. Morrison Jr. clearly remembers Fosta-Tek Optics' first day in business. Employees were sent home at the urging of emergency management officials as Hurricane Bob whipped its way up the Eastern seaboard.

It was hardly an auspicious beginning, recalled Morrison. the company's president and principal investor. Fortunately, it was not a harbinger of things to come. Today. Fosta-Tek will celebrate Five years in business as an independent company. The business - descendant of Foster Grant Co. - is the last vestige in Leominster of the mighty manufacturer of sunglasses that once employed more than 1000 people at its Hamilton Street complex.

The sunglasses division of Foster Grant was bought by a Dallas based manufacturer, the Bonneau Co., which moved the operation to Dallas. The much smaller technical-products division was bought by Morrison, who kept the operation in the same 67,000-square-foot facility at 320 Hamilton St.

Fosta-Tek has survived and grown by finding its place in the Opt ICS market. The company works only with plastic. and provides one-stop shopping for buyers who want their products engineered, designed and produced under one roof. Fosta-Tek produces everything from sunglasses and magnifying glasses to hard-surface lenses used by the military.

FUTURE UNCERTAIN
Fosta-Tek was facing an uncertain future when Morrison was looking to invest in a manufacturer. At the time, former Foster Grant employees Chester Fantozzi and James R. LeBlanc were keeping the technical products division going while Foster Grant went through bankruptcy.

The youthful Morrison. then 30, was working on corporate finance and mergers for E.F Hutton on Wall Street. He had attended the Amos Tuck business school at Dartmouth College and had also worked for Norton Co. in Worcester.

There were 58 employees when Morrison bought Fosta-Tek for $1.8 million on Aug. 16, 1991. Today, there are 75 employees.

Three months after Morrison bought the company, it turned a profit. A contract with Mine Safety Appliances to produce lenses for the goggles worn by Apache helicopter pilots and a contract with Foster Grant for lenses in sunglasses accounted for a good portion of the business, he said.

Four months after the business started, Fosta-Tek landed another military contract. It produced sand, wind and dust goggles that eventually would be used in the Persian Gulf War.

Annual sales during that first year were $3 million, said Morrison. But neither Morrison nor his senior management realized how cyclical the military contracts would be. After a year, sales had risen to $5 million, but by 1995 had reached only $6 million.

Morrison said he had hoped the company would have $15 million to $20 million in annual sales by now. At that level of sales it could buy its raw products more economically and make better use of its engineers' time, he explained.

NEEDED DIVERSIFICATION
"We have stumbled," said Morrison. The company's mistake was in relying too heavily on military contracts. "You've got to ride a roller coaster" for the military business. he said.

The experience has taught the company an important lesson: Diversify. In particular, the company has begun looking to the electronics industry as a profitable market.

Fosta-Tek manufactures specially coated mirrors and reflective lenses that are used in the Delco Electronics system for cars known as "HeadUp". The reflective lenses produced by Fosta-Tek had to be designed to take into account the shape of windshields.

The Head-Up system reflects information from the dashboard onto the windshield so the driver never has to look away from the road. Speed, turn signals and gas levels can be made visible on the windshield day and night.

The company makes the plastic cover for some hand-held price scanners and the cover to a car telephone that will be standard equipment on new Cadillacs. The telephone automatically dials 911 if the 'car's air bag deploys. Using global positioning system satellites, the telephone will relay the exact position of the car so rescue personnel can be dispatched immediately.

The company designed the first optically correct lens for firefighter helmets, said LeBlanc, who has two brothers who are firefighters. Before Fosta-Tek developed the helmet lens, the visual field to the sides was distorted, he said.

The company also developed a special coating for lenses on breathing masks worn by firefighters. The lenses have the best rating of any lens against heat and abrasion, he said.

WENT TO OLYMPICS
Fosta-Tek makes sports lenses for Bausch & Lomb. Several thousand of those lenses were distributed during a promotional push at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, said LeBlanc. The company also makes Optims, over-the-counter reading glasses.

Meanwhile, the company landed a new, $2 million military contract this year, after a dry period of several years, said Morrison. The company developed, and is producing, the lenses for gas masks issued to infantry soldiers. The lenses have significantly improved protection, said LeBlanc, who displayed one lens that had a small indentation from a 22caliber bullet the company had testfired at the lens.

Ironically, even as the company is moving to diversify its customer base, the military business is as good as it ever was, thanks to the gas mask contract, said Morrison. The Fosta-Tek lens is the only lens used in the mask, he said.

The company's goal now is to reach between $15 million and $20 million in annual sales by the time its 10th anniversary comes around, according to Morrison. That will put the company on a more equalfooting with its large suppliers and customers. The sales level would also move the company ahead of its competitors, all of whom are under the $10 million annual sales level, said Morrison.

"It's certainly been quite a five years," Morrison said. "We want to stay so somebody would have a chance to talk to us in 10 to 15 years."