DRIVEN TOWARD 75 | POLO CUSTOM PRODUCTS
By Chris Marshall
While Topeka’s accommodations may have initially been a surprise for companies like Mars and Walmart, others have known what was here all along. Polo Custom Products, which is celebrating its 75th year in 2022, already had its corporate offices in Topeka before opening a new fulfillment warehouse in August 2021. The expansion is expected to result in an economic impact of $61 million over a 10-year period.
Kent Lammers, Polo’s president and CEO, has lived in Topeka since he was less than a year old, and did not need to be sold on expansion in the city he grew up and works in. However, GO Topeka’s incentives could not have come at a better time.
KENT LAMMERS | President/CEO of Polo Custom Products | Photo by John Burns
Polo, a contract manufacturer that designs and engineers custom products for the medical, fire and safety, industrial, and government and defense markets, had factories in Iowa and Minnesota before adding a third in Topeka. Lammers anticipated the company’s year-over-year growth to continue until COVID-19 hit their finances hard.
The company was deemed essential and avoided layoffs, wage decreases and reduced hours, which Lammers says was the top priority, but sales in 2020 were less than half of what he projected.
Thanks to the expansion in Topeka, Polo rebounded quickly, with a 32 percent growth in sales from its pandemic low point. Lammers says the recovery “would not have been possible” without the facility and its new employees, whose training was funded in large part by JEDO.
“One of the most challenging things in any startup factory, like the one we have in Topeka, is scaling it,” Lammers said. “We have 88 people here. So, training that many people was time-consuming and costly, and the JEDO funding really helped us get that off the ground.”
Lammers, who first joined Polo as a Washburn University student 38 years ago, worked his way up from account manager to president, with several stops in between. It’s a prime example of how the growth of one employee, when given the opportunity, can contribute to the growth of a company, and on an even larger scale, the entire community.
“We sense the positive movement of Topeka as a destination community to live and work and play,” he said, “and we want to embrace that and grow, not only the corporate facility, but possibly our footprint in manufacturing to be inclusive of the positive changes in Topeka.”
TK
