Protect Door fills niche for secure doors
BY DEAN LESAR
TRG
A little more than a decade ago, Alan Deiler saw the market was open to a niche product in his industry. The door was open, you might say, to selling doors.
Not just any doors, though, but specialty doors, ones lined with lead, that would serve the health care industry as well as provide security in school buildings and office spaces. Looking to expand the product line he had already established at his Strek-O door manufacturing plant in Abbotsford, Deiler created an offshoot in Spencer that has become a go-to source of specialty doors for architects designing everything from hospitals to government buildings.
Deiler opened Protect Door in Spencer in 2010, and started with one employee making a custom-ordered lead-lined door. Today, the Spencer plant produces 100150 doors per week, each one of them custom-designed and hand-crafted by a team of 17 employees on the floor and another five in the office. Protect Door’s products are opening and closing in amusement parks, prisons, schools, office complexes and elsewhere not only across this country, but around the globe.
Deiler has been in doors for a long time, first as an employee of a Marshfield manufacturer. In 2004, he bought the Strek-O factory in Abbotsford, a family business that dates back to 1940. There he continued building a wide range of doors, all sold through orders from architects for specific building projects. The approximately 50 employees there move from 900-1,000 doors out the door every week.
Along about 2010, Deiler noticed more requests for a very specific product, a lead-lined one to serve a growing need in the building industry. Hospitals were in need of such doors for their X-ray areas, and demand was also increasing for doors that would provide more safety for those behind them. The specialized process it takes to manufacture such doors requires a clean environment, so Deiler went looking for a new location for his idea.
He found the right place on Highway 13 on Spencer’s south side. The former Fiskars manufacturing plant had been vacant for several years, and although it was far larger than what Deiler needed at the time, it provided other amenities that suited his business plan. Little did he know then, but all that space would soon come in handy.
“I thought, ‘It’s so darn big. How are we gonna fill this up?’” Deiler said. “Now we’re adding on.”
What helped at first was that there was only one
A Protect Door employee in Spencer runs a CNC program to prepare a specialty door for outfitting with hardware.
DEAN LESAR/TRG
