Brady Corporation Business Information, Profile, and History

Company Perspectives

At Brady, our mission is to provide innovative identification solutions which improve safety, security, productivity and performance for customers worldwide.

History of Brady Corporation

Brady Corporation, formerly known as W. H. Brady Company, is an international manufacturer of high performance labels and signs, printing systems and software, label application and data collection systems, safety devices, and precision die-cut materials. Brady serves over 300,000 customers in a wide variety of industries including general manufacturing, maintenance and safety, construction, electrical, telecommunications, electronics, laboratory/healthcare, airline/transportation, security/brand education, governmental, and public utility industries. Its more prominent customers have included NASA, Boeing, Hollywood's film industry, IBM, PepsiCo, General Electric, and the Alaskan oil pipeline. The company manufactures over 50,000 products, which are distributed in more than 100 countries across the globe.

1914 Origins

W. H. Brady traces its origins to founder W. H. (Will) Brady's early career as a salesman for an Ohio remembrance advertising firm that manufactured calendars, yardsticks, and other promotional items on which advertising messages were printed. After turning down a promotion to the company's New York office, in 1914 Brady founded the W. H. Brady Company in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Brady's hometown. His first product was promotional photographic calendars sold to offices and stores, but he soon followed with elaborate color displays for ice cream parlors, printed glass beer signs, point-of-purchase displays, and pre-billboard roadside advertising.

After a decade and a half of growth, the stock market crash of 1929 and the depression that followed drove many of Brady's customers out of business, forcing him to sell his home and, with his parents' support, enroll in college. In the midst of this crisis, an unusual promotional gimmick saved the firm. Candy-maker Webster's Famous Fudge included in its fudge packages a small, paperboard card that contained rows of perforated circles, each of which concealed a prize number. When customers exposed a winning number by pushing out one of the circles on the card, they won four free candy bars. The product fit neatly into Brady's printing, die-cutting, and laminating capabilities, and, aided by the cross-country marketing efforts of Will Brady's oldest son Fred, Brady-manufactured push (or punch) cards, as they were called, were soon being used to sell everything from cigars and cigarettes to beer and turkeys. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Brady manufactured millions of push cards, becoming their largest producer in the United States. By the late 1930s, the company had declared that its new purpose was to carry on the business of printers, publishers, and painters of advertising matter and, in general, to engage in advertising businesses of all kinds.

Postwar New Product Lines

As World War II erupted, Will Brady yielded leadership to his two sons, Fred and Bill Jr., who from 1942 to 1955 shared direction of the company. The war brought shortages in the paperboard Brady used to make push cards, which was only partially offset by stopgap contracts such as printing morale booklets for the Red Cross. In 1944, however, while working at Milwaukee electrical control manufacturer Cutler-Hammer, Bill Jr. discovered the wire marker card--an adhesive card from which numbered cloth strips could be pulled and wrapped around electrical wires for identification purposes. The self-adhesive (or "pressure-sensitive") tape technology on which the wire marker card was based was still relatively new, but there was an urgent need for a clear and easy way to identify the ever-more dense masses of wiring being installed in ships, planes, and other military equipment. Moreover, the printing, die-cutting, and laminating processes for the paperboard backings on which the wire markers were placed were the same ones Brady used to make push cards. The new Brady markers were quickly embraced by the war industries; among their uses was the identification of wiring for the Manhattan Project construction work.

Sensing an untapped market, Brady began sending its four-page sales brochure to electrical manufacturers around the country and was quickly bombarded by inquiries. It began improving its markers' flexibility and applications by adapting them to customers needs: it made wire markers easier to remove from their backing, for example, and improved the type of material used for the backing itself. After the war's end, wire markers continued to eclipse push cards as Brady's main product, and Brady began performing the typesetting for the marker's label, offered new marker sizes and numbering systems, and introduced new marker types--from circular labels and Underwriters Laboratories seals of approval to small safety signs, pipe and conduit markers, and foil-, epoxy-, and vinyl-based markers that could resist oil, acid, and temperature extremes. Brady's first Caution and Danger safety signs appeared in 1949, and Brady's fallout shelter and radiation hazard signs enjoyed brisk sales during the 1950s and 1960s when the threat of nuclear weapons and radiation was at a peak.

At the same time, Brady was developing proprietary machines that could laminate, die cut, print, and cut to length in a single operation, boosting production volumes and cutting unit production costs. Because it was inexpensive for Brady simply to mail potential customers samples of its markers, it was not until after 1950 that it developed a national sales force. By the late 1940s Brady nevertheless claimed distributors in over 125 cities, most of which were local outlets of national electrical firms. By 1967 the 200 distributors Brady claimed in the early 1950s had grown to more than 1,000.

National Presence: 1950-60

By the early 1950s, Brady had become a national presence and chose "identification specialists" as the way to describe its specialized product niche to the increasingly interested industrial consumer. In desperate need of more production space, it moved permanently from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, to a new facility in Milwaukee in late 1952. The move hastened the pace of new product development, which averaged one new product every one to two months. The thirteen products listed on the company's letterhead in 1954, for example, had grown to twenty-one by 1956, and between 1944 and 1969 alone Brady introduced more than eighty new products in a variety of materials, sizes, and colors. By the late 1960s, Brady was offering 10,000 stock items in 35 distinct product groups.

Brady's 1953 introduction of Blue Streak Release--an adhesive so effective that labels and markers could be dramatically increased in size without loss of adhesion--was another major step forward in Brady's labeling capability. It also led Brady into a new product group--coatings--that would eventually form a crucial component of its product line and signaled Brady's desire to control as many stages of the label production process as it could. To manufacture its coatings, Brady engineers designed and built proprietary machinery that was used to produce a vinyl tape product suitable for making warning stripes for factory floors. Brady could now free itself of its traditional dependency on 3M, its major tape supplier, and by supplying its own tape could now determine the characteristics, price, and quality of the materials it used in production.

In 1955 profits surpassed the $1 million mark for the first time, and two years later Brady--with Bill Jr. now alone at the helm--expanded into another new product line: nameplates. Thousands of consumer products, from power tools to washing machines, required plates that identified the manufacturer or displayed ratings or instructions. The sale of its aluminum and polyester nameplates (Quik-Plates and Poly-Plates, respectively) gave Brady a new niche in another lucrative market.

The same year, yet another innovation, the Markermatic automatic wire marker application system, solidified Brady's position in the expanding identification products industry. When loaded with a wire marker card, Markermatic automatically peeled back the card's adhesive starter strip, picked off an individual marker, wrapped it around the wire, and returned for the next pass--at a rate of one thousand markers an hour. The machine proved to be a substantial source of lease income for Brady while simultaneously promoting the adoption of its wire marker brands. As Bill Jr. later remarked, "Markermatic made us king of the hill in our industry. Customers perceived us as the leader." Quickly capitalizing on the product's success, Brady followed with Printermatic (an automatic label printer), Wrapmatic (a device for wrapping tape around cylindrical objects), and Aisle Markermatic (a machine, resembling a floor polisher, for the precision-marking of factory lanes).

Overseas Expansion: 1960-70

With the establishment of Brady Canada on the outskirts of Toronto in 1958, Brady moved into the international marketplace, which within 40 years would generate nearly half its annual sales. In the following years Brady added a nameplate manufacturing operation in Mexico (Uquillas-Brady) and a marketing/distribution operation in England (Simpson-Brady), which by 1962 had evolved into Brady England, Brady's first overseas facility. Although Brady claimed to have no strategic plan for its foreign expansion, a pattern nevertheless emerged. It first established a sales presence in the new foreign market, followed it by building a warehouse to maintain stock for the market, graduated to a leased manufacturing plant managed by local staff, and finally moved on to a new factory owned by a full-fledged subsidiary.

In 1966 Brady opened Brady Europa, a warehouse/factory in Belgium, and in the early 1970s, it bought out its ailing Australian distributorship to form Brady Australia. A formal international division was established in 1972 when Brady Sweden and Brady Germany joined the fold. Discovering that its foreign operations tended to thrive only when it established a subsidiary, rather than merely a distributorship, Brady opened a combined sales/warehouse/factory as Brady France in 1980. By the end of the year, Brady's international subsidiaries were accounting for 20 percent of the company's annual sales--the level at which they stayed for years, despite the addition of Brady Japan in 1987.

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of both continued growth and difficult transitions. Brady's new microscopic, fireproof component markers were being launched into orbit on Gemini space missions, and Brady had presciently seen the potential of the computer market as early as 1962 when it began selling computer-printable wire markers.

Before the end of the decade Brady was manufacturing labels, markers, drafting aids, and keypunch-hole correction seals specifically for the still-infant computer industry. Annual sales broke the $10 million mark in 1968, driven by a robust annual growth rate of 18 percent between 1953 and 1969, and Brady's policy of plowing profits back into new product development continued to reap benefits. By the 1990s, Brady was investing roughly four percent of annual revenue into new product R & D, and its expectations for such innovations were high. In 1989, for example, Bill Brady Jr. announced that he expected new products to account for 25 percent of Brady sales every year.

Corporate Reorganization: 1970-80

Brady's hierarchic management structure was meanwhile showing signs of obsolescence, and its sales force, overwhelmed by the sheer number of products Brady now offered, could only show a limited part of the company's product line to each customer. Partly as a result of these problems, in 1971 Brady experienced a decline in sales for the first time since the wartime years of push cards and morale booklets.

Brady's answer to its troubled business structure was to scrap it in favor of a group of individual divisions, each focusing on a specific product line and market: the Nameplate Division, the Data Processing Division, and the Industrial Products Division, each with its own sales, marketing, and manufacturing units. Rather than conform to a top-down corporate plan, each division manager established his or her own pace for the division, which operated virtually as an independent company.

As the company adjusted to its new structure in the 1970s, product innovation forged ahead. Circuit tracers, hot stampers, nameplates made of specialized materials, and portable wire marker books were added to the Brady catalog in the 1970s. More importantly, typewriter lift-off correction tape and BOT/EOT markers for detecting the beginning and end of recorded data on computer tapes provided Brady with two lucrative new markets to pursue, and it was soon a major player in both. In 1977 Brady unveiled its LiteTouch membrane switches, in which electricity-conducting inks and adhesives enabled consumers to turn on microwave ovens, dishwashers, and sewing machines with a touch of the finger. Ironically, given Bill Brady Jr.'s disdain for government intervention, major federal legislation in the 1970s helped to further boost demand for Brady products. The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 imposed a series of regulations regarding signage, safety warnings, and hazard identification in the workplace, and a related law in 1977 required all trucks carrying hazardous materials to sport high-visibility warning signs. By 1980, Brady had climbed past the $50 million sales plateau.

Not all of Brady's new product gambles bore fruit. In 1969 it introduced Phodar, a method for manufacturing printed circuit boards using dry resist techniques rather than the traditional liquid resist method. It had to abandon the product in 1972, however, when DuPont's competing brand won the battle for market share and Brady's engineers were unable to overcome Phodar's poor shelf life limitations. The same year Brady unveiled Kalograph, an instant, one-step label maker that promised to enable customers to create their own custom industrial labels. The product's high cost, however, combined with its inability to create black lettering and its labels' tendency to fade in sunlight, undermined Kalograph's early promise, and in 1979 Bill Jr. finally pulled it from the marketplace, making it the most expensive failure in Brady's history.

Growth: 1980-90

After the lull in acquisitions of the 1970s, Brady began shopping for potential targets again in the 1980s. Small- to mid-sized, privately owned businesses with stock product lines and technologies similar to Brady's were scrutinized, and between 1981 and 1987 Brady acquired the Weckesser Corporation, a manufacturer of plastic wiring accessories (later sold); the M. C. Davis Company, a maker of miniature and subminiature coils; the MPV Company, a manufacturer of hard protective coatings; Browncor International, a distributor of shipping and packaging supplies; Revere Products, a direct marketer of maintenance products; and, most importantly, the Seton Name Plate Corporation, a manufacturer of nameplates and a business-to-business direct marketer, established in 1956. The Seton acquisition allowed Brady to supplement its traditional niche-focused sales and distribution network with blanket mail order sales through Seton's industrial catalog, which in 1988 alone reached eight million potential customers. Brady soon was establishing Seton subsidiaries in England (1985), Canada (1986), and Germany (1988).

Now operating six domestic divisions and eight international subsidiaries, Brady's annual sales grew 350 percent through the 1980s to $175 million, and profits soared past the $10 million mark. In 1984 Brady became a private/public hybrid when it sold 500,000 shares of nonvoting stock to avoid the estate taxes due when Bill Brady Jr.'s heirs inherited his stake in the company. That moment came in 1988 when Bill Jr., the Brady Company's second founder, died, and a longtime Brady insider, Paul Gengler, took over direction of the company. Brady retired its family-run reputation permanently in 1994 by hiring Katherine M. Hudson, a vice-president at Eastman Kodak, to lead it into the 21st century. An aggressive, hands-on executive with a ready sense of humor, Hudson announced her intention to quadruple annual sales to $1 billion, improve earnings, and exploit new opportunities for joint ventures, acquisitions, and geographic expansion, particularly in such new markets as Italy, Brazil, and the Far East.

A year into her tenure, Hudson announced that Brady's far-flung operations would be reorganized into three international divisions: the Identification Systems and Specialty Tapes Group, the Signmark Group (renamed Graphics Group in 1996), and the Seton Group. A year later Brady acquired Varitronic Systems, a U.S. manufacturer of high-tech printing systems, and two British firms: TechPrint Systems Ltd., a printer producer, and the Hirol Company, a manufacturer of printing systems and die-cut parts for electronics, telecommunications, and medical testing markets. Brady also sold off its nameplate and medical wound care operations to concentrate on its core businesses and entered into a joint venture with a South Korean marker equipment firm. It was also continuing to push the technological envelope of labeling and coating product design. Between 1980 and 1996 it introduced bar code software; a fully automated labeling machine for circuit boards and electrical components; and the Bradywriter printer, which allowed customers to print their own marker legends in house. It also began offering an express custom sign-making service; computer systems to exactly match customers color samples; installation, training, and contract services for Brady products; and integrated product groups that widened the number of labels and markers customers could choose from.

1998 and Beyond

As Brady prepared to enter the new millennium, the company opted to change its name to Brady Corporation. Hudson gave reasoning for the change in a July 1998 company press release stating, "As a company that's operating on a global stage to provide high-performance products and services, Brady needs a strong identity which communicates the quality, innovation and global reach we represent." She continued, "W.H. Brady Co. was named after the company founder, William H. Brady. While the name has served us well through the years, the name Brady Corporation reflects our growth from a private, small company founded in 1914 to a publicly traded, international business."

Exposure to international markets however, proved costly as the Asian financial crisis cut into the company's bottom line. Sales in Asia faltered and the company was forced to trim costs and cut 200 jobs. Nevertheless, Brady was determined to continue its growth strategy and take advantage of burgeoning new markets. In August 1998, it purchased Brazilian label manufacturer VEB Sistemas de Etiquetas Ltda.

Movement into foreign countries continued in 2000 and 2001 as Brady purchased companies in Australia and Germany. A new manufacturing facility was established in Penang, Malaysia, in 2002, while a second facility went online in China the following year. Overall, the company made four acquisitions in 2003 including TISCOR Inc., which was based in San Diego, California; Etimark GmbH of Germany; and two Brady distributors based in the United Kingdom.

Hudson stepped down in 2003, leaving Frank M. Jaehnert at the helm. Growth continued under his leadership. In fact, Brady made its largest acquisition to date in 2004 when it purchased EMED Co., a New York-based sign manufacturer with sales of $55 million. Shortly thereafter, Brady added Singapore-based ID Technologies Ltd., New York's Electromark, U.K.-based Signs & Labels Ltd., and Technology Print Supplies of Thailand to its arsenal. The company also expanded its operations in Wuxi, China; Sydney, Australia; and Manaus, Brazil. Sales in fiscal 2005 increased by 21.6 percent to $816.4 million while net income jumped to $81.9 million--an increase of 61.1 percent over the previous year. Approximately half of Brady's sales stemmed from its operations in the Americas while Europe accounted for 34 percent. Sales in the Asia Pacific region accounted for 15 percent of total revenues.

Along with its growth-through-acquisition plan, the company also eyed product development as crucial to its future success. Some of its new products included the LabXpert laboratory labeling and printing system that offered more than 140 laboratory-specific symbols and label templates for vials and test tubes. It also introduced BradyGlo photoluminescent products and the AquAlert labels that changed color when they came into contact with water or water-based liquids. The company's strong product lineup left it well positioned for future growth. Indeed, with record sales and profits in its coffers, Brady appeared to be on track for success in the years to come.

Principal Subsidiaries

Tricor Direct Inc.; Worldmark of Wisconsin Inc.; Brady Investment Company; Brady International Sales, Inc.; Brady International Company; Brady Worldwide, Inc.; Brady Australia Pty. Ltd.; Visi Sign Pty. Ltd.; Seton Australia Pty. Ltd.; W.H. Brady, N.V.; W.H.B. do Brasil Ltda.; W.H.B. Identification Solutions, Inc.; BRC Financial; EMED Co., Inc.; Stopware, Inc.; Permar Systems, Inc.; Henryc, Inc. (United States); Oliver of New York (United States)

Principal Competitors

3M Company; Avery Dennison Corporation; Integrated Security Systems Inc.

Chronology

• Key Dates
• 1914 Will Brady establishes the W. H. Brady Company in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
• 1944 Brady's son, Bill Jr., discovers the wire marker card--an adhesive card from which numbered cloth strips can be pulled and wrapped around electrical wires for identification purposes.
• 1949 Brady's first Caution and Danger safety signs appear.
• 1955 Profits surpass the $1 million mark for the first time.
• 1966 Brady opens Brady Europa, a warehouse/factory in Belgium.
• 1971 Brady experiences a decline in sales for the first time since the wartime years.
• 1984 The company goes public.
• 1994 Katherine M. Hudson becomes the first non-family member to run the company.
• 1998 The company changes its name to Brady Corporation.
• 2004 EMED Company is acquired for $190 million.