Stainless Steel Products: Movin’ Right Along
By Marion Keller
For Stainless Steel Products, growth has been both a blessing and a challenge, necessitating creative solutions. After three decades as a New York company, the bulk steel wire supplier has relocated fully to Pennsylvania, setting up shop in a newly renovated 38,000 square foot facility in West Reading that provides ample space for future evolution.
Apart, Then Together
When SSP was founded in 1995, New York state seemed like the best place to build a business; however, a quarter-century later, new options were needed. Lengthening lead times pushed SSP to expand its inventory, increasing quantities of brush wires in stainless steel, oil-tempered steel and copper-based brush wires such as brass, phosphor bronze and nickel silver.
To accommodate this expansion, SSP moved its brush wire crimping, straightening and bunching operations to a new facility in Mohnton, Pennsylvania, in January 2022. A year later, though, both original and new locations were straining at the seams. Space wasn’t the only consideration — running one company in multiple locations was growing increasingly difficult from a logistical perspective.
“Even in New York, we were in two separate facilities and four different units,” says Ralph Rosenbaum, president of Stainless Steel Products. “When we moved partially to Pennsylvania, I was commuting back and forth, and it was a pain in the neck. Managing it was really tough because I’m only one human.”
SSP started looking around for other alternatives. Finding a building that could accommodate both the electrical systems needed for machinery and manufacturing floor space was a bit of a challenge. Finally, SSP settled on a site being sold by Fortna, a provider of warehouse and distribution solutions using automation, software and robotics.
“It was a manufacturing space back in the day, but it evolved into a sales office,” Rosenbaum says. “It needed a lot of rebuilding and demolition work. We went through several months of knocking down and building up.”
In April 2025, SSP moved completely out of New York and partially into the new facility. However, it was not until August 2025 that the space at 333 Buttonwood Street was ready to house the entire operation under one roof. While SSP still has a few employees working remotely from New York, the company is now effectively based in Pennsylvania — and is expanding its workforce as it settles into its larger location.
“We’ve tapped into a pretty good labor pool,” Rosenbaum says. “Here, people are acclimated to manufacturing. We have more applications, people are waiting — that’s a really good plus. And being in one consolidated space that is organized just makes management a lot easier.”
Room to Run
In West Reading, SSP has about 27,000 square feet of manufacturing floor space and 9,500 square feet of warehouse area, with the rest of the facility taken up by offices and conference rooms. Rosenbaum is enjoying certain perks of having a newly renovated location. “I have a door to my office, which I never had before!” he mentions.
And doors aren’t the only welcome new feature in West Reading. In addition to high ceilings and a climate-controlled environment, the manufacturing area has an open floor plan that allows for different areas for specific processes. “This setup lets us be organized for each of the different processes we do, with breathing room,” Rosenbaum says. “We can actually optimize equipment layouts and set up cells.”
Improved processes are leading to increased output. “Our bread and butter really is crimp wires of any alloy and straightened power brush wire,” Rosenbaum says. “We’ve improved straightening and respooling, we’ve got several machine lines of crimping — we’ve increased capacity almost everywhere. Power brush wire is in pretty hot demand, so we’re running that all day long.”
And the combination of improved processes and increased space has opened up new opportunities for SSP. For example, the company previously had no room to cut wires to length, forcing it to import them as needed. Now, SSP can expand this capability — and that’s not the only one.
“We want to focus the company on straightening and cutting as well,” Rosenbaum says. “We’re trying to go slow to make sure we can produce a good product. This move gives us room to breathe, room to grow.”
Unfree Trade
Rosenbaum is especially glad that SSP has found such a promising new home, given all of the other uncertainties and challenges currently affecting the brushware industry. Number one on the list of those is, of course, tariffs — and the many changes associated with the trade policy as a whole under the Trump administration.
“We draw our own wire, but we don’t have hundreds of machines to pump out the volume. When it comes to customers with high volume, we need to import,” Rosenbaum muses. “The tariffs have impacted us tremendously. You have to pay the duties up front, which we had not been doing before to such a large degree — that’s the biggest impact.”
The uncertainty around tariffs under the current administration isn’t helping matters for the brushware industry. “With the chaos that’s a residual of the tariffs, it’s very difficult to plan,” Rosenbaum says. “We try to absorb as much as we can from a cash flow perspective. What has impacted us most has been the tariffs on steel and copper.”
The ultimate result of tariff increases is typically price increases, as manufacturers seek to push the impact of the higher costs down to the customer. Rosenbaum expects this to occur in the brushware industry over time. “Prices are going to have to increase somewhat. It’s bound to catch up as inventories turn over,” he points out. “It would have been better to plan a transition, instead of saying, here it is, good luck. With all of the tariffs, how do American manufacturers stay competitive globally? How can they even plan effectively with so much cost volatility?”
Looking Ahead
Despite the effects of tariff increases, SSP is keeping its eyes on the nuts and bolts of its industry — especially on the parts that are changing. “I see a lot of customers going away from cut-to-length material and toward automated equipment where they have material on reels, but there are still plenty of customers for actual cut-to-length materials,” Rosenbaum says. “Stranded materials result in less customized inventory for the brush manufacturer, but, given the expensive machinery required, the cost/benefit ratio may not be there.”
SSP is also looking to target some new opportunities as it works to expand its clientele. “As we grow, we would like to expand our customer base in other industries we currently sell into, such as oil and gas, biofuels and aerospace,” Rosenbaum says. “We’re also looking at other industries where we could offer larger diameter wires. We’d like to expand our sales of straight and cut wire for larger diameter.”
The new facility is currently operating under two shifts — 6:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. to 11:00 pm. Moving beyond current manufacturing constraints may require the addition of a third shift, though there are only partial plans in place for that strategy at the moment. “We don’t have a tremendous amount of room to grow, but we could add a third shift and probably expand to Saturdays and Sundays,” Rosenbaum says.
The company has examined potential benefits for its systems from artificial intelligence, but hasn’t settled on an AI strategy at this time. “We looked into some robotics and found out that the machines aren’t as expensive as the software to run them, so we couldn’t justify the expense,” Rosenbaum says. “But, in the future, who knows? I’d love to automate some of our processes.”
On a smaller scale, AI LLMs are helping streamline some non-manufacturing tasks for SSP. “ChatGPT is amazing. I use it every day to format letters, conduct research, analyze lengthy legalese documents to prepare responses, calculate technical results or confirm what we’ve already figured out,” Rosenbaum says. “Right now, I’m translating these complicated forms from Spanish to English with ChatGPT. Before, we would have had to pay a translator.”
Convenience Factor
Rosenbaum and his staff are definitely enjoying the benefits of their new location. The facility is a convenient commute for most employees, with some living around the corner. Electrical supply houses and big box stores are nearby and easy to access.
“I used to eat at my desk all the time, but now I can go home for lunch, or I go out,” Rosenbaum says. “I’ve got a nice conference room now, so we can have regular group meetings. Just in general, we have more room to breathe.”
Stainless Steel Products began operations in June 1995 and became a member of the ABMA in 1997. The company serves industrial manufacturers in North America with value-added services including application engineering assistance, responsive customer service and quality products.
Learn more about Stainless Steel Products at www.stainlesswires.com.
