Sellars Absorbent Materials started in a garage on West Congress Street. With steady growth over four decades, it now occupies six buildings on the North and Northwest sides, where it manufactures and distributes products that include shop towels and rags, disposable wipers and a growing line of environmentally friendly paper towels.
The family-led company, with annual revenue in excess of $100 million and more than 220 employees, earlier this year began full production with a crew of about 20 workers at the former Wisconsin Color Press plant, 5400 W. Good Hope Road, as part of a $15 million investment. As production there ramped up, the company leased another nearby plant to accommodate ongoing growth.
The buildings, two of which Sellars owns, are located in economically challenged areas. Most had been sitting vacant, some for many years, until the company moved in.
“As we grew, we could have acquired land to build on and left the city,” says CEO Tom Sellars, whose brother, John, launched the business in 1985 in the garage of his West Side home. “These aren’t the hottest growth neighborhoods and lots of companies have moved out and are expanding elsewhere. That created an opportunity for us. We found good buildings that we could rent or buy at half the cost or greater. We aren’t a company with huge resources. We’d rather invest in our proprietary technology, not in buildings.”
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Sellars makes wiping products that are sold under multiple brand names, including Toolbox blue shop towels and white rags. Other brands include Clean Task and Mayfair. Products are available at retailers nationwide, including home improvement, farm and auto parts stores.Its Bravo paper towels, which are experiencing a growth spurt, are now available in Woodman’s and Sendik’s and more than 300 Target stores. All of them are made in Milwaukee.
Opportunity in Milwaukee
Sellars has its headquarters and manufacturing operations at 6565 N. 60th St., a sprawling plant located just north of West Mill Road that formerly housed a manufacturer that supported the telecom industry. It closed more than 20 years ago, leaving 350 people out of a job. Along came Sellars.
“I drove by this plant every day wondering if we could work this out,” Tom Sellars says. “That was our first step. We did a lease and then we bought it. Then the business grew and we needed to expand again.”
Sellars also operates a production plant at 6540 N. Industrial Rd. Two of Sellars’ facilities are former big-box retail locations, including a 138,000-square-foot former Sam’s Club at 7701 W. Calumet Rd. on the far Northwest Side. Sellars has also taken over a one-time Lowe’s store at Midtown Center, 5800 W. Hope Ave.
“The Sam’s Club building was vacant. A lot of crime, drugs, prostitution. Not good for the area,” Sellars says. “We worked with the developer and the city to be the long-term sole tenants.” Sellars is leasing the facility with an option to purchase and is using it as a warehouse.
The Midtown Center site had also sat unoccupied, along with a building that once housed a Walmart. Lowe’s and Walmart had served as anchor tenants on the west end of the Midtown Center development. Both closed due to high levels of theft and safety concerns, Sellars said.
Lowe’s moved out of the Midtown Center building in 2009, which then sat empty for nearly a decade until Sellars signed a lease for the site in 2018. It was during lease negotiations that Sellars met current Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, who was alderman for the district at the time.
“When buildings like that are vacant, the blight starts to take hold and people then think it’s OK to do some really unsavory things,” Johnson says. “That’s what we were seeing before we worked to have Sellars come in. We saw semitrucks parking there without permission. There was prostitution, drug use, illegal dumping and vandalism of the building.”
The city worked with Sellars and property owner Phoenix Investors to move Sellars’ warehouse operations into the building.
“It really turned things around,” Johnson says. “This eliminated that blight, which then helps to improve the quality of life for people in that neighborhood. I lived in that area, too, at the time and I would see it every day. When these big-box retailers leave, it really creates a problem.”
Sellars’ latest commitment to the city involves a $15 million investment in a plant that formerly housed the printing operations of Wisconsin Color Press, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2002. The facility had 250 employees at the time.
Sellars has installed two large machines in the 100,000-square foot facility, where the company is producing high-quality, double re-crepe material used to manufacture a variety of so-called nonwoven products. The double re-creping process enhances the strength, bulk, absorbency, softness and appearance of paper-based wipers, which Sellars makes using a mixture of virgin and recycled fibers. Sellars holds 20 U.S. and 33 international patents for the technology.
“Our goal with this new facility is to grow our business and build on the proprietary technology we have developed,” Sellars says.
Sellars has found success in growing its business in Milwaukee, about 100 miles south of the Fox Valley, a longstanding hotbed for paper products production.
Sellars believes making investments in Milwaukee has been advantageous.
“In some ways it would be even harder in the Fox Valley because we’d be competing for jobs with Kimberly- Clark or Essity, and others,” Sellars says. “Milwaukee is a really skilled manufacturing city. It has a lot of engineers and millwrights and gives us a pretty good cost structure.”
He notes that most of Sellars’ paper suppliers are based in Wisconsin.
Big growth in a niche sector
Sellars’ latest success story is the development – although it took years to come to fruition – of its Bravo brand of paper towels, which are made from 90% recycled paper waste, mostly carboard boxes that likely would have ended up in landfills. The cardboard box content in the towels gives the rolls a tan color, a factor that might not have found success with prior generations who preferred white towels, says Sellars, who insists attitudes are changing.
“We did research and found out the color was no longer a deterrent,” he says. “We wanted to make a unique statement, so we left it natural. The really hard thing was to drive the performance.”
The challenge, Sellar says, is to make a premium product with recycled input, which is of lower quality than virgin materials that come directly from wood.
“It took us a long time. We filed patents for the technology,” he says. “The other thing we had to drive against is that competitors in the industry have put more air into the paper to make customers think they’re buying more. The problem is that it costs more to distribute while increasing your ecological footprint, which is not good. It also takes up more shelf space.”
Sellars describes the Bravo recycled paper towels brand as a “disruptor” because the rolls are compressed and take up less space on trucks and store shelves.
“Our six-pack is the equivalent of 18 rolls. It’s super dense,” Sellars says. “If you’re the big company, you don’t want less in sales because people are buying less frequently. But because we’re the disruptor and the small guy in a $5 billion market, we’re really happy with 5% or 10%.”
As of August, the Bravo brand was experiencing a 50% growth rate, Sellars says.
“We believe we’ll be highly successful,” he says. “We’re just trying to get shelf awareness and make a great product.”
The impetus for the Bravo line stems from an environmental mission and a business opportunity, Sellars says.
“It’s a combination of taking a waste stream, making a quality product and doing it cost competitively,” he says. “That’s great for the consumer and we’re helping, in our own little way, to make a little bit of a difference in the world. You can’t be a sustainable company if you can’t sustain profit. A lot of environmentally friendly products have a sales proposition that the product is less harmful and the right thing to do. But it’s often more expensive and doesn’t work as well. You can have a great mission but mission without profit means there’s no mission.”
Not just jobs but homeowners
Sellars’ investment in the North and Northwest sides has been a major boon for the area, says Stephanie Harling, who is executive director of Havenwoods Neighborhood Partnership and also heads up two business improvement districts that serve the area.
“Sellars’ investment in manufacturing and job creation is very important, and from what I’m seeing their employee base is very representative of the city,” Harling says. “We’re thrilled to see their growth. They’ve been a huge asset for not only Havenwoods but they’ve also moved farther northwest into the Granville business improvement district. The company’s footprint is getting bigger, which really makes it easier for residents to find family-sustaining jobs.”
She applauded the company’s investment in older and often long-vacant buildings.
“The company is taking what might be viewed by some businesses as no longer viable buildings and making them viable again,” Harling says. “They’ve also taken over big-box stores that have left the area. Although we would love to see more job creation in those former big boxes, if it weren’t for Sellars, who knows how long those buildings would be empty. Big boxes come in with a splash and they take up a ton of real estate and then they leave and you’re sitting with all that.”
Tom Sellars says the company invests in its employees with a variety of initiatives and benefits, including comprehensive health care, retirement accounts and performance and attendance bonuses. But a mission near and dear to company management is a push for home ownership among its hourly employees.
“Home ownership creates stability for families,” Sellars says. “Lack of home ownership and lodging puts families in tailspins.”
Through involvement in a program with Havenwoods Neighborhood Partnership, home ownership, which once seemed out of reach, has become a reality for some Sellars employees. The company not only matches grants by the organization to employees for home ownership but also champions the program and celebrates successes.
“Sellars goes above and beyond to make sure employees know about this opportunity,” says Katlin Hahn, director of operations at Havenwoods. “Sellars sees the long-term benefits of homeownership for employees, and they want to see not only their employees but also this community thrive.”
The homeownership initiative, along with other ongoing efforts by Sellars to invest in its workforce and the community, are vital for the health, safety and overall quality of life in the area, the mayor says.
“When folks have access to good-paying, family-supporting jobs, it puts them in a position to purchase a home and not be transient and have neighborhoods be porous,” he says. “It allows neighborhoods to become cohesive. That cohesion builds the public safety that all of us want to see. There’s an even bigger boost here when the company you work for is providing you with a quality job and actually makes an investment in you and maybe gets you in a home in a neighborhood not far from work.”
