ITW Pro Brands Adds Atlantic Mills

I&I company ITW Professional Brands (formerly ITW Dymon) and Atlantic Mills, a Lakewood, NJ disposable nonwoven wipes maker, have combined product portfolios and will now operate as ITW Pro Brands.
 
The company’s brand portfolio includes LPS, Scrubs, Dykem, Rustlick, Accu-lube, Dymon, Spray Nine, Atlantic Mills and Sertun. This scale-up of previously independent ITW (Illinois Tool Works) business units is the result of in-depth market research with key channel partners, noted the company. With the brand alignment, ITW Pro Brands says it now offers greater resources and support to help distributors differentiate themselves and grow their business, along with a larger field sales organization to better serve end users.
 
“We listened to our distributors and took decisive action by combining three of our strongest business units into one organization,” said ITW Pro Brands VP and GM Paul Taylor. “The new structure makes doing business with us easier and more efficient. It also allows us to invest greater resources into our brands, driving end user demand and deepening our commitment to new product innovation.”
 
As part of the scale-up, ITW Pro Brands now offers distributors one point of contact for all of its brands and common technology and distribution points for all of its products.
 
“By aligning resources and focusing on supply chain excellence, ITW Pro Brands customers will enjoy greater product availability and improved customer support,” Taylor said.
 
While the customer-facing business teams have already been reorganized, ITW Pro Brands is still developing systems and processes to support the newly-formed organization with plans to have everything in place for 2015. This will result in unified order entry and billing, along with harmonized marketing programs, according to the company.
 
“We are going to be in a substantially better position to truly partner with our distribution channel. Our distributors will benefit from a substantially larger field sales organization, which is positioned to generate more end-user demand for all of our products. Additionally, industry surveys tell us we have strong brands, and we are investing to further develop and nurture these important assets. Finally, we have a substantially stronger research and development team that is more focused than ever on creating a robust innovation pipeline that will result in a constant flow of exciting new products for our distributors to sell,” Taylor said.
 
ITW Pro Brands has enhanced its innovation process with research facilities in Chicago, Atlanta, Kansas City, Maryland and a global innovation center in India. By combining business unit resources, ITW Pro Brands can conduct world-class research, resulting in customer-driven innovation.
 
“We’re committed to not only bringing new world-class products to the market—but also to building a team of world-class problem finders and solvers,” said Taylor. “In other words, ITW Pro Brands will be in the business of rolling up our sleeves alongside our distributors, focusing on end-users and helping them identify problems they didn’t even realize they had—and then developing exceptional products to solve those problems.”