Wooster Brush Decided to Compete Through Innovation

The paint applicator industry is made up of a relatively small number of companies, and it changes only slightly from year to year. This is partly because painters tend to be very steadfast in terms of the type of paint applicators they use. TheWooster Brush Company is one of the larger factors in this industry and has been around for 151 years . With its long history, Wooster Brush has been in an excellent position to watch and benefit from trends as they have developed in this industry.

Over the past few years, Wooster Brush had been manufacturing a small-diameter roller-cover system. As the company watched the use of this mini-roller , it noticed that the roller really didnt perform as well as it could. It didnt always roll up the wall well. It might just slide up the wall when it was filled with paint, and it would not always turn as freely as it should. The company also noticed that users of competitive mini-rollers often experienced similar problems.

Another trend identified by Wooster Brush was the influx of foreign competition into the mini-roller market. Because of the effectiveness of using a mini-roller for detail painting jobs, the market for these small rollers was growing. As this was happening, several manufacturers were importing minirollers from China and other offshore sources. Wooster Brush was being forced to compete with these lower-priced imports. The company concluded that its best response would be to innovate. It would make substantial improvements to its existing mini-roller.

For many years Wooster Brush had been a leader in traditional roller covers (9 inches long, 11/2 inches in diameter). It also produced an excellent cage frame that was very well accepted in the marketplace . The company decided to shrink all of that down to a small diameter. The engineering department was challenged to come up with a very tiny cage frame and a small, low-priced roller cover that would consistently roll on the wall without slipping. To meet competitive costs, mini-roller covers would be developed in a variety of professional-quality fabrics that would be more affordable than traditional small-diameter covers.

The engineers were able to develop a system that turned more freely. The old mini-roller contained a free-floating retaining band that was hard to line up with the wire handle and that often caused friction between the frame and the roller cover. This made it hard to roll. The new system is actually a separate cage system and a cover. The cover has nothing to do with the rolling of the frame. There are no works inside. The cover is easy to slide on and off. It will withstand the abuse of a professional painter and still allow for constant rolling day in and day out. The system will also keep the cover from walking off as you paint up the wall. In sum, the best technology from the large Wooster Brush frames was used in the development of Jumbo-Koter.

Like most successful new products, Jumbo-Koter was not created overnight. Six years earlier the company had noticed the need for an improvement in mini-rollers. At that time Wooster Brush had made an initial attempt to create a small caged cover system. The company succeeded technically, but the product was not very attractive. FinallyWooster Brush pushed the button on a major development effort that took eighteen months to complete. It took another three months to achieve the initial national distribution. At the time of this writing, Jumbo-Koter has been in national distribution for one year and is considered by current users to be a major innovation in the paint applicator category.