WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) - Summer is the high season for Dry Corp., an innovative Wilmington company that’s all about keeping things, well, dry.
It’s the season when kids get out of school and become active - active enough to sometimes break an arm.
The company’s Dry Pro products seal up those casts, with a sleeve forming a vacuum to keep out the water, explains former podiatrist Roy Archambault, head of the company he started in 1998. It’s something that saves vacations and trips back to the hospital for new casts.
Summer is also the active season for beach- going, surfing and paddleboarding. The company’s Dry Case products help protect smartphones and other devices from the splashings they inevitably get and enable their active use in wet environments - swimming and diving, for instance.
The combination of innovative products and the company’s culture of collaborative ideas and camaraderie are the ingredients for success, said Archambault, called Dr. Arch by his staff. That success was enough to earn the company small business of 2013 by Business North Carolina magazine.
In winter, Dry Corp. employs 15 plus three interns from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In summer, that rises to 30, and Archambault says the total grows every year.
Tucked away in an old warehouse near the Military Cutoff Road entrance to Landfall, some of the company’s winter staff work away with garage doors open to the chilly air. Here is where the products see final assembly and storage.
It’s also where each product is tested up, said Corey Heim, the company’s chief operating officer.
Dry Corp. makes its own molds. Pumps and other parts are assembled on site.
“We have a latex dipper,” Heim said. “We send companies molds and they dip the molds and then send us the rubber boot that comes off it. We put the cap, valve and pump on it.”
Up the stairs is an enclosed board room - an old table seating perhaps a dozen. There, Dr. Arch and Heim explained their two-pronged approach to success.
Archambault said he didn’t start out to make a waterproof sleeve.
“Another person and myself both did a lot of surgery” and needed to keep the sites clean and dry, he said. “It was mainly for our own patients, to keep stuff clean and dry.”
A good idea, Archambault said.
“The Internet had just come out,” he put the product up, “and it just took off,” Archambault said. “We make our own molds. We have PICC line and IV line covers - a nurse suggested it.”
Dry Pro products - made entirely in the United States - are sold through independent pharmacies and durable medical equipment stores all over the country, as well as on Dry Corp.’s website, Heim said.
The Dry Pro sleeve cast protector runs $35 to $40. Dry Case is a later addition to the company, coming about six years ago, and is seeing rapid growth.
“We took the same technique in creating a vacuum seal and applied it to a clear bag,” Archambault said.
The bag originally was designed for cameras, he said, but it developed just as the first iPhone came out.
The idea once again came from experience.
Archambault said he was riding his bike in a thunderstorm and got his smartphone wet.
He went back to the AT&T store and got a new one, but later that night “I jumped into my hot tub with it and had wrecked two of them.”
Archambault and Heim - who joined the firm in 2005 as an intern - scoured the Internet for a product like what became Dry Case.
“(But) there was nothing with a vacuum seal that would keep your electronics dry,” he said. “We created a prototype and applied for a patent.”
The product has evolved.
The company added an armband to help out paddleboarders, for instance. But the feedback indicated that if the band fell off it went straight to the bottom.
“Now the armband is buoyant,” Archambault said.
So who are the company’s customers?
“The athletic individual is our main customer,” Archambault said. “Initially it was going to be for surfers and that’s how we promoted it, and I actually thought it would be great for kids texting their friends in the pool or ocean.”
But then about three years ago the company attended its first dive trade show, said Heim, a graduate of UNCW who met Archambault at a N.C. World Trade Association gathering.
“It was the biggest show as far as getting new accounts,” Heim said. “It really blew us away how many shops there were and how eager they were to buy.”
The new users keep on coming.
“We are bringing in a lot of new products and really becoming diversified,” Archambault said. “This should be our best year ever. We’ve gone from just the waterproof phone bag … to waterproof buds and microphones.
“Our latest direction is waterproof knapsack bags.”
The company showed its brand-new waterproof camouflage bag at the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s Shot Show in Las Vegas, branching into the hunting market.
“Our product development process involves listening to customers and staff,” Heim said. “It’s easier for us to develop products that we know we are going to use. With the Dry Case line we have been able to add new products at a higher rate.”
In fact, there will be six new Dry Case products coming in the next four months.
In 2007, however, the company faced a crisis.
A fire destroyed its former headquarters, but it brought out the best in the staff.
Only a couple of days later, employees had set up lean-tos out front to continue the company’s business, Archambault said.
“We were sitting outside while the (building) was burning, assigning responsibilities to each other to get things going again in a few days,” he said. “The fire put even more motivation and camaraderie in the company.”
Every year the company commemorates the fire with a blaze behind its current building.
“We’re not celebrating the building burning down,” Archambault said, “but the phoenix that rose again.”
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Information from: The StarNews, https://starnewsonline.com
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