Fire-Dex Fills the Hole Left by Shuttered Kitsbow
Personal protective equipment (PPE) manufacturer Fire-Dex is filling the gap Kitsbow, the now-shuttered, American-made cycling apparel brand, left in North Carolina.
Kitsbow first announced it would cease production at its Old Fort, N.C., factory in March, with then-CEO David Billstrom attributing the decision to a lack of operating capital and an unfriendly investment environment. Manufacturing ceased the following month. By mid-April, the company was “actively in negotiations” with several different parties about a potential acquisition.
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At its height, Kitsbow’s factory employed about 60 people, though that number had fallen to 41 by March. The facility injected an annual payroll of approximately $2 million into Old Fort and surrounding McDowell County, Billstrom claimed in his farewell letter to customers.
Fire-Dex, a manufacturer of PPE for first responders, first learned of the vacated space in late June, chairman and owner Bill Burke said on the company’s blog. It flew its executives to Old Fort the following week and within 10 days, it had signed a lease for the facility and started the process of bringing former factory employees onboard. According to Billstrom, Fire-Dex has hired about five of Kitsbow’s former sewers.
By the end of July, Fire-Dex had hired 15 employees to staff its new production facility, with plans to hire roughly 10 more by the end of September. The company plans to train employees in making suspenders and pockets first before ramping up the facility to full PPE production after 18 months of operation. Long-term, it anticipates hiring up to 200 full-time sewers to staff the facility. The 25,000-square-foot Old Fort factory marks Fire-Dex’s fourth major production center.
“Our new facility in Old Fort will meet the same high standards that all Fire-Dex facilities strive for,” John Karban, vice president of operations for Fire-Dex, said in a statement. “This includes Pelham, Georgia, where back in 2018 we succeeded in keeping over 50 jobs in the region after making it our home, and have since expanded to employ over 100 team members. More recently, our fast growth has made the addition of a fourth production center essential, and we look forward to welcoming the new associates to our Fire-Dex Family.”
Even as Kitsbow was entering its final weeks of production earlier this year, another company was moving manufacturing to North Carolina. Tex-Tech Industries, a developer of specialty textiles, high-performance materials and coatings for the automotive, aerospace, defense, medical and protective apparel industries, announced in March a nearly $25 million investment into a 170,000-square-foot manufacturing center in Kernersville, N.C. The move would create 49 new jobs in the Winston-Salem community, it estimated.
Later that month, the Catawba Valley Community College’s Manufacturing Solutions Center (MSC) officially opened a second facility in Conover, N.C., to house its growing incubator program. As of this spring, four graduates of the program had set up residence in MSC II—the new 75,000-square-foot facility—including the compression garments brand YoU Compression and Evolved by Nature, a firm developing cosmetics and apparel technologies.
