Premier Kevin Interview | Who Make Premier Paint Brushes?

all right so Kevin uh we just got you know a tour of the factory and one of the things that's just extremely fascinating to me is the quality control of your brushes and stuff and people using fingernail clippers to clip off filaments is just absolutely incredible and you know can you just talk about that process and why you guys do that a little bit well I I think when I started in this business um which was over 20 years ago already which is a little scary uh my grandfather was still working part-time and still alive and uh between him and my father and their Relentless focus on quality I think that's just translated to to me and to my sister sorry when you make a strategic decision and vision to go as deep as we did into super high quality paint brushes right there's a tremendous amount of financial resources that go behind that so in when you when you're going to focus on that sort of commitment long term for your family for your business you can't worry about the pennies you have to look at things and really focus on the quality to most people in manufacturing would look at that and be like you're crazy but for me that's just how we operate our business on rollers and brushes we are very focused on quality yeah one of the reasons why I chose to have you guys you know make our brush the brook brush was because of the quality I I feel like it's the best rush out there but also you are a family owned and operated company and I believe I heard from you that it started with your father and can you just speak a little bit about that you know your company and the history of it sure so Saturday night today or a third generation but the business was actually started by my grandfather in the 1960s but he was already in his 40s I think technically it was incorporated in 1968 but he was in the business in the early 60s soon after 1968 my father joined him so really they built the business it was my grandfather's Vision but that blended with my father's work ethic right the two of them built this business throughout the 60s 70s 80s and 90s until Saturday night joined in the late 90s and the rest is history from there so your grandfather he started out making rollers is that um true he was a manufacturing 100 genuine lambskin roller covers with my grandmother in the basement of their house in Flushing Queens so from making uh rollers lambskin rollers in the basement to this gigantic facility now that's just an incredible journey and um I think it's important for me too like to choose a company high quality family owned and operated but um with a long history you know that's just it's incredible your grandfather he started making rollers in his basement did he actually was he a painter he was not a painter um my grandfather uh you know immigrated to this country uh in 1947 my grandmother there of European descent he did everything from own a few candy stores on Coney Island to driving a New York City Taxi Camp which he thought was going to be for a year ended up being for about 12 or 13 years and then someone he knew was going into this business and they had and they talked about and that's who he actually started with in the 60s that partnership they had a different Vision I think my grandfather's Vision was um larger than his and so after a few years the friendly parted ways and then my father joined so he was not a painter the real question uh that my grandfather had when he was presented this idea and I started talking about it is do you throw the roller out after you use it and the answer was yes and he's like I mean you know he knew there was repeat business there and Longevity you know in terms of the products he got through World War II being a good engineer so he was able to apply all that he learned I think uh those years in the war and post-war to the engineer inside of our business we're like right in the heart of New York I think I mean I flew into JFK and um we drew drove through a bunch of side streets to get here and it seems like we're just right down in the heart of it all here you are you're in uh so the five boroughs make up New York City uh most people refer to Manhattan as New York City but it's really the five boroughs and we're in Queens which is if it's not the most diverse borough of all five it is one of the most diverse places in this you in the country so we are very fortunate to have a very diverse Workforce hard-working people such as ourselves uh very dedicated to our business how many employees do you have working here manufacturing all these brushes and rollers globally we have over 100 people we never look at numbers we 10 and to focus on the quality of the employees and when we get busy we tend to have people work a lot more over time but as our business grows in the United States on the premium side we'll continue to add to that head count but we don't just hire anyone we take a lot of care a lot of training and we will work with people and have them come in six days a week and work overtime to ensure the stability of uh and consistency of the quality of our products it does seem like they all really take pride in what they're doing absolutely and when I'm not traveling I spend time on the factory floor all right I grew up in this business in high school and I think when I first started uh uh you know here in my mid-20s I unloaded trucks myself on on a hot and humid day so I really learned the business from the ground up and it's important for me to get out and be on the floor to say hello to the people to to know their names to see if there's any ongoing improvements that our business can make and and so I like to touch and feel and I take a tremendous amount of pride in a roller manufacturing as well as these paint brushes so it just gives me great joy just to walk around the floor and see the success what you have here is over 200 000 square feet of a quintessential New York City building this building in particular as you can see is painted over it's at sealed test milk this was built just after the Great Depression and it became a seal test milk factory and the adjacent part which is hard to see here was even earlier I think it's from the it was the early 1900s so it is completely inefficient as a manufacturing facility I mean we could take half the amount of space be in Boise with 40 foot ceilings and be and come all our products start at one end and come out the other but when I started here you know my father's advice was this is our building we own it and we make do so we've taken this old milk factory and we've made it as efficient as possible for our business yeah it's uh what we call Old School old school you know um and again we're less as a company and as a family we're less focused on the Optics of the material things in life and our building because when you go inside like we have you see the focus on the quality and that's the only thing that we really care about at the end of the day it doesn't matter what happens on the outside it matters what happens on the inside absolutely I walk around the building as I mentioned and you know I have visions of spending time here with my grandfather even when I started working as a kid so there's a very deep meaning here deep personal history so and that support of of customers in the United States is so so important because we want to continue to grow this business we want to continue to maintain a legacy for the next generation and that support here is so so important so you're definitely not going to be moving from here anytime soon not the manufacturing you know we have a distribution point in Phoenix which is the western part of the United States uh and any manufacturing that's done vertically integrated uh will continue to come out of our Mexico facility but all the premium products and U.S made products and stuff that you love and the painters love that stays right here in New York right you know as we were moving from our facility in Brooklyn uh wait my father and grandfather um you know there was a lot of work that was done at night and on the weekends and I used to tag along with my father um and interestingly enough one day we were in the building and they were knocking down some walls and I kind of stayed behind and I picked up I don't know maybe I was four years old a sledgehammer and I kind of just threw it against the wall and this whole wall came crumbling down next to me it was maybe 14 feet high wasn't very wide and everyone ran from around the corner and was like couldn't believe it like I just was a little kid and I and I hit the wall once and you know those are the stories and my dad still tells and they're like scared you could imagine you know right the hell out of them um and then as a little kid I used to take those long roller sticks with a buddy of mine and it was like when Star Wars was out and we used to like pretend that they were swords and I mean foreign