25 YEARS OF SERVICE

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Walking through Cummins Inc. Seymour Engine Plant and Valeo Lighting Systems, you will find products made by another Seymour company.

If you ever find yourself visiting University of Wisconsin’s Kohl Center, merchandise is secured behind an enclosure made by that company.

Watching an episode of the NBC television show “Chicago Fire,” viewers would have seen the actors trying to break through a product made by the company.

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And at many military facilities around the country, including Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, its products can be found.

SpaceGuard Products manufactures wire partitions and area guarding products, including wire mesh storage lockers, rack safety panels, aisle guarding and mezzanine rail guarding.

The wire mesh partitions are available in standard and custom sizes for a variety of uses, including machine and robotic guarding, computer security cages and networking facilities, tool cribs and warehouse or retail security.

Company officials are proud of how far the business has come. This month, they had a chance to recognize the successes as the company celebrated 25 years.

President Eddie Murphy credits several things for the success. One is making quality products.

“It’s a bit automated, but it’s also manual in some sense,” said Murphy, a native of Detroit. “We’ve always made one of the highest quality products in our industry out of all of the competitive products out there.”

The company’s offerings are produced in-house, and it takes all 38 employees to make it happen, Murphy said.

“A lot of that has to do with the guys we have on the floor,” he said. “We have three guys on the shop floor with 25 years and three over 20. You’re talking about a company that’s 38 employees. You start taking a look at all of that and how long these people have been here, the tenure that they have, I think it’s a testament to us and to them.”

Customers are another piece of the puzzle. SpaceGuard has a nationwide network of distributors along with distribution centers throughout the United States. The company’s products also reach other countries.

“We’ve shipped things to a little bit of everywhere, and we’ve got a nice national coverage,” Murphy said. “And people come back. It’s repeat business and great customers that have come to know that we always deliver on time, we do what we say we’re going to do every time. So we deliver, and that’s a huge part of why we’re in business.”

SpaceGuard Products was formed in 1990 through the consolidation of Logan Wire Co. and Ford Fence Co.

After it had been in operation for five years, Murphy’s father, Edward, and a business partner bought the company. A few years later, that partner left, and Edward Murphy became the sole owner until his son bought it in 2008 and became president in 2012.

The business was based on a woven wire style partition guarding product. Since then, several products have been added.

Eddie Murphy said the core of the business is for industrial storage or material handling distributors. It also sells to data communications facilities, and its products can be found guarding some popular names.

“We’re around people that are powering everything from the New York Stock Exchange to Facebook to you name it,” Murphy said.

A SpaceGuard cage also is around the controlling station of Xbox Live, which people play at home using an Internet connection.

“We have a cage around a couple hundred Xboxes all plugged in and wired in with broadband and redundant power so they couldn’t go down, and people are playing those from home from behind our cage,” he said.

SpaceGuard also has AisleGuard safety barriers in industries and RailGuard handrail safety systems in arenas.

Throughout the years, Murphy said, it has been interesting to see where the company’s products wind up.

The cages and lockers have provided secured systems to all branches of the U.S. military, and caging has been in various movies, including “Firewall” starring Harrison Ford in 2006 and “Salt” starring Angelina Jolie in 2010, and TV shows, including “Chicago Fire” in 2013.

“It was pretty neat to actually see your stuff used in a scene with the fire behind it and they had to bust through,” he said of the “Chicago Fire” episode. “I’m sure they had to do quite a few takes of it and beat it up quite a bit.”

Murphy said the Seymour facility has staff focused on sales, but it also relies on its distributors to drum up business.

“We do some proactive marketing to try to get our product specified into architectural projects for new construction or general construction for renovation, those types of things,” he said.

“Then some of it is our outside sales team is actually reaching out to the distributors, creating new distributors, developing those distributor relationships because we rely a lot on our distributors to bring in our business,” he said. “They’ve done a great job for us over the years. Having that diverse group across the country has really helped us out.”

Hauris Lewis has experienced all aspects of the company. A year before arriving in Seymour, the Jefferson County native was a computer aided draftsman for Logan Wire and Ford Fence in Indianapolis, which at the time was owned by Figgie International. He was hired to introduce CAD to the company.

When he began working in Seymour in 1990, he learned more about the company’s products and moved into customer service. In his first four years, SpaceGuard served as a training ground and went through four presidents and two vice presidents.

Once the Murphy family took ownership, Lewis’ roles expanded. He spent time on the West Coast as a regional sales manager and operated a warehouse and then returned to Seymour in 2005 and became vice president of operations.

“I was just kind of young and just trying to figure out where I fit into society and find a workplace,” Lewis said of the beginning of his journey. “Lo and behold, I just kind of grew with it, and through some trials and tribulations and some rough waters, it got to this point, so it worked.”

Murphy, who now lives in Columbus, said it has been nice working for a small company and seeing it succeed.

“We’re more like a family here,” he said. “We have long tenure. We keep people, we’re small, and we run a good company. The ones who want to do the work, we stay and we work with them, and they work with us.”

As the company reflects on the past 25 years, it looks ahead with plans to grow.

Murphy said SpaceGuard is in the process of taking all of its product lines and developing them into one product line that can be marketed more easily. It also is trying to improve its efficiencies through mass manufacturing.

The company currently sits on 5 acres on the east side of Interstate 65, but it owns 10 acres and plans to use that extra space to add on and make room for additional equipment and storage space.

That could lead to employee growth, and the goal is to become a two-shift operation in the next few years, Murphy said.

“You’ll see some changes here over the next three to five years,” he said. “We need to grow in order to make sure that we actually secure the future of the company and do it the smart way, too, do it logically in a nice fashion so that we’re not growing too fast for our own good.”

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SpaceGuard Products, 711 S. Commerce Drive, Seymour, manufacturers woven and welded wire mesh partitions, storage lockers and area guarding solutions for secure storage and safety needs.

Tenant storage lockers are for industrial storage or shared area storage in apartments, condominiums, executive suite offices, military bases and retail back rooms.

Security enclosures are for the collocation of computers and networking equipment in data centers, offices and schools and universities.

Wire mesh partitions are for tool cribs, warehouse security or segregation, temporary holding cells, evidence/specimen storage and machine guarding.

Rack safety panels are for pallet rack backs to help prevent damage and injuries from accidents in a warehouse.

AisleGuard barriers and RailGuard mezzanine safety systems are designed to meet Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards and protect personnel from costly accidents.

The company’s products are available for quick shipment and quality installation through a national network of preferred distributors.

For information, visit spaceguardproducts.com or call 812-523-3044 or 800-841-0680.

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