Video: Worldwide Protective Products Manufacturing Floor

The MSC supplier profile series sharing innovations in safety.

Hi I'm Rebecca, a category strategy manager at MSC, and today we're here at Worldwide Protective, a manufacturer of gloves, sleeves, and garments. We're going to check out their state-of-the-art knitting facility.

Hey Jeff, nice to see you.

Hey guys, nice to see you too. Welcome to Worldwide. Hey, would you guys like to go out to the factory floor for a little tour?

Sure, awesome.

What really got me excited to work here and want to come to Worldwide was the fact that we can develop new yarns that had different properties in them and then make them into new products, which is really exciting. Especially when you see a new item, you know, start off from the yarn concept develop into the actual product, you do all the testing, and then when it finally starts to sell it's an amazing feeling.

So, at this facility as you can see we have 400-plus knitting machines that can make anywhere from 7 to 10 gauge gloves, gauge being the thickness of the glove. We can also produce arm protection, which is a sleeve to go all the way up your arm.

So we specialize in cut levels A2 – A9. We also have engineers on staff that have textile backgrounds that can help us develop new products and new yarns.

And over here is where we head into our main knitting floor where most of our industrial gloves are made.

And this is Jacob, our R&D engineer. He'll be giving you the tour of the plant. Have a great time touring the facility, ask him all the questions you want, and I'll talk to you guys later. Thanks guys, and I leave you in good hands.

So, this is our knitting floor. We have the largest American glove manufacturing facility in the country. We run about 400 to 450 knitting machines, three shifts, five to six days a week. You can kind of see we have it split up into our 13 gauge thinner ones down here, moving into our 10 gauge in the middle, and on.

One thing really exciting and great about Worldwide is the fact that we've basically built this business on customization.

As it's going through, you're going to have it knit all of your fingers first, palm into your thumb, second palm and then finish out with the cuff.

We take our standard products and we can do anything that you really want to them. Talk about a reinforced thumb crotch, we can change the length of the cuff on the glove, we can put leather on the glove, we can put certain types of PVC coatings on the glove, dots or a webbing type of pattern. So, whatever you guys can really think of we can do it for you.

How many gloves can this machine make every day?

You know, depending on the size of the glove. Smalls are going to be a little quicker than larges, but you're looking every 2-3 minutes or so you're spitting out a glove.

The big problem with safety products, or PPE in general is if they're uncomfortable, if they don't fit right, people tend not to wear them and that's how accidents happen.

MSC is one of our biggest partners out there, and the director of category management, Anthony Testa, came to me about six months ago and said  "I have an application where the customer is not using a glove because it's so hot in the facility, but they're constantly cut and burned."

So, thinking together, my team and I really went back and we figured out really what Anthony could use for this customer. So, he said I needed it to basically protect against sparks and heat. I would like something that's cooling for them that would actually allow them to wear a glove, and they needed a thin glove and they needed dexterity and grip. So, at the end of the day we came up with a 13 gauge glove that had a Stay Cool plating in it, which is our wicking material that helps cool down your hand as well as you put a webbing on there, that gave them grip and abrasion. And we were able to get them cut levels all the way up from A2 to A6 all in a 13 gauge glove. Very exciting.

Alright, so this is pretty cool. So this is going to be our 10 gauge machine, but what's cool about it is they were using an F wound or composite yarn.

Up-winding is the process when we take several different types of finish yarns, and we combine them together in a winding process and we wrap them so we can create even more cut resistance.  So you can take inherently cut-resistant materials and you put them together to make an even stronger cut-resistant yarn.

You're able to put really strong fibers in the core, like fiberglass or stainless steel, you're going to be looking more in A6s or A7s rather than your A2s and A3s and A4s of aramid.

So these are going to be really popular in the food processing industry as well as some heavy industrial type of applications where you need that really, really stiff cut protection.

We're constantly looking at new yarn development, looking at new product development, trying to make it the highest cut, the lightest and most comfortable glove or sleeve or garment that is in the industry.

Alright, now that I've shown you guys some of our more standard industrial knitting, we can go on into the next room. I'll show you something really cool and innovative in our cloth cover room.

So here is going to be our showroom. This is kind of a great representation of what we're able to do here at Worldwide. I didn't get a chance to show you guys, but here are some of our garments. We make these using our up-wound yarns that we do in Syntex. Really popular in the glass industry, really high cut.

And then you can kind of see some of the stuff we saw when we were out on the floor. We saw the 13 gauges as well as the claw covers and some of the heavy-duty 7 gauge. And then here is going to be an example of some of our coated product as well as our dipped offering.

Awesome. Jacob thank you so much for the tour today, it was an amazing manufacturing facility and it's extremely innovative, and thank you for partnering with MSC.

Yeah, thank you guys for coming.

That was awesome, thanks so much to Jeff, Jacob and the entire Worldwide team. Today we got to see how they manufactured their gloves, sleeves and garments. How they create proprietary yarns using their up-winding machine. For more information about this and more PPE, please visit https://www.mscdirect.com/betterMRO/.

Connect, optimize, and innovate at https://www.mscdirect.com/betterMRO/.