Manufacturer launches $15M facility in PIC West

With nearly a quarter-century of manufacturing in hand, an Aurora-based glove manufacturer has expanded its operations to the Queen City.

Youngstown Glove Co., which makes utility gloves for industrial, construction and utility use, is amid equipment and product testing for a new product line at a newly constructed Partnership Industrial Center West facility at 1820 N. Alliance Ave. Officials say they began moving equipment into the facility in October following completion of the $15 million, 71,000-square-foot construction project.

BP Builders was general contractor, with H Design Group LLC serving as architect for the project. David Henderson is owner of the company, which he purchased in late 2007 through his Blackstone Investment Group Inc., headquartered in Aurora, according to Ryan Malone, Youngstown Glove Co. president. Through Blackstone, Henderson also owns several other companies, such as outdoor gear manufacturer Mountainsmith and Carry Gear Solutions, which creates private label cut and sewn products such as backpacks and custom bags.

Youngstown’s new facility will build rubber gloves for utility workers, and Henderson told Springfield Business Journal in early 2025 that the company should initially create 20-25 jobs with plans calling for growing the workforce to 75-100 employees in a few years’ time. The building features a 67,000-square-foot warehouse and a 4,000-square-foot, two-story administrative office area. Company officials say the facility is equipped with automation and robotics to manufacture, test and distribute voltage-rated rubber gloves for industrial, construction and utility line workers.

As Youngstown works to dial in the manufacturing process at the Springfield facility that officials say includes time and temperature variables, the employee count is around 20, Malone said.

“With Blackstone as the parent company, we share accounting, we share (human resources), we share (information technology), and so those employee counts aren’t included in that 20 number,” he said.

Malone said he began with the company when it was founded in Los Angeles in 2002. He works for Youngstown from its LA office still used for design and development and was in Springfield in mid-December to check in on the plant’s progress. In LA, all the production samples come into that office where they’re measured and checked for quality standards to make sure they fit right, he said.

“We work with primarily three main factories that we contract manufacture within Indonesia,” he said, noting Youngstown sells over 1.2 million pairs of its leather gloves per year.

Officials say the Springfield facility occupies over 2 acres on a 15-acre plot of land the company owns in PIC West. Aside from its proximity to the airport and Interstate 44, Springfield also offered a larger employee pool than Aurora, said Levi Wilson, operations manager.

“I was very impressed with the number of applicants that are out there looking,” Wilson said. “We’re going to phase it in because we’ll obviously ramp up our first year. We’re kind of metering into the market.”

He added, “First year is probably 20 or so, but by the end of the first year rolling into second, it should be somewhere in the 30 mark.”

So, when will the facility be considered fully operational?

“Not soon enough,” Malone said with a laugh.

He estimated production of Youngstown’s rubber gloves line should begin between mid-February to late March.

“The goal is that we’ll be fully open for business in Q2,” he said.

Meeting demand
Malone said glove sales have risen about 20% year over year – including 2025 – for roughly the past five years, he said, declining to disclose annual revenues.

“What Youngstown first started out to do was making a new type of work glove for the construction trades,” he said. “So it was basically like a sports glove, like a wide receiver’s glove or a golf glove, form-fitting, very dexterous, made out of newer types of materials, synthetic leathers and spandex and things that were form fitting and machine washable.”

Youngstown began connecting more with utility companies after the purchase by Blackstone.

“They were pressing us to make better and more advanced product, and that just suited us way better,” Malone said of utility companies such as California-based Pacific Gas and Electric Co. “And we’re like, ‘This is the space we want to be in. We want to become the No. 1 working glove brand for electric utilities and the linemen that work on the power lines.’”

Max Hackett, Youngstown’s vice president of sales and marketing, said its utility company users are in the hundreds. Its distribution is primarily in the U.S. followed by Canada and a “smattering of places overseas,” Malone said.

“We take care of the home turf. If we see that our growth starts to go down, we can start to put together international distribution plans and dedicating resources to that,” Malone said. “But we have so much in front of us that our real focus is providing product to the U.S. market.”

Glove inventory fills boxes stacked nearly floor to ceiling in a back portion of the company’s new facility. Initially, plans were to just keep the rubber gloves produced on-site at the Springfield plant, but Hackett said it made sense to have the work gloves there, too, to fulfill orders from one facility.

“We feel like we have an obligation as well to be in stock for those major utilities,” Hackett said, adding some line workers may go through as many as six pairs each year. “We try and always have three to four months on hand so that we can take on new large customers and make sure we fulfill for the existing ones.”

While the gloves are made to form-fit hands, they are also very technical products, Malone said, adding that the gloves go through a lot of internal and third-party testing so they can be flame- and cut-resistant and arc flash-resistant. An electric arc is an electrical explosion that produces a bright flash gas, where temperatures can exceed 35,000 F, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

“It’s a very technical high-end product, and that kind of manufacturing no longer exists in the U.S. at a grand scale. It’s basically been relegated to only a handful of countries,” Malone said of China, Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam. “Those are basically the four remaining countries that do technical glove-making to the level that we need and that the workers want. And so that’s just kind of one of those dead trades in the U.S. that didn’t survive.”

As for the rubber gloves, Youngstown will be harnessing automation and robotics to make the products locally and be cost-competitive with overseas manufacturers, officials said.

“Also, it’s a market that doesn’t want an import glove,” Malone said. “This is a glove that protects their life, and they want made in the USA. And so, we’re able to do that here.”

There will be no batch inspections for the rubber gloves, he added: “They all have to be visually inspected and electrically tested – every single pair,” Malone said. “If you’re making 10,000, you can’t just test 1,000 and assume those 9,000 other ones are good.”

Programming automation
The company will mix material for the rubber gloves from large 6,000-gallon tanks filled with liquid latex. Wilson said the liquid product is heat-sensitive and forms the product.

He said several aspects of the glove-making process are proprietary, such as the temperature to which the liquid latex is heated.

“It’s within safe tolerances, to put it that way,” Wilson said. “We touch it and it’ll be uncomfortable, but it’s not super hot. So, the process is inherently safe.”

When it comes to programming the automation involved in the process, Wilson made an analogy of baking bread.

“If you don’t start with the right bread, you put too much flour or not enough, you don’t get the right product.

So that’s one of the automation projects that we’ve taken on to develop is to get that consistent every time,” he said. “We’ve identified certain parts of our process that if you introduce any type of issues in, it destroys the process from that point on. So, those are the automation projects we’ve really picked up to lock those down.”

When fully operational, Wilson said the plant may produce 750,000 to one million pairs of gloves annually.

Targeting growth
Malone said the idea of building a roughly 71,000-square-foot facility on over 2 acres means the company could conceivably build four additional comparable-sized structures on the plot of land it now owns. However, he said no plans are in motion for future facilities.

“One of the key things for us was to build for future expansion,” he said. “We didn’t want to build this pretty new building and in three years would have to go find more land and bifurcate the operation. We could grow here for decades to come and also expand into additional product categories.”

Malone said other rubber products may follow, such as sleeves that go underneath the gloves, or rubber blankets that line workers drape over power lines they’re working on.

“There’s all of these ancillary types of rubber products that since we’re doing the rubber gloves, that technology can go into those other products as well,” he said, noting a second phase could lead to production of rubber sleeves, followed by a third phase to produce rubber blankets. “So, we can build other products. We can set up additional facilities on this property to help carry those products.”