Article: Behind the Scenes of American Excelsior’s Pivot from Pandemic Response to a Record-breaking Quarter

American Excelsior was recently featured on Thomas Insights, with an interview conducted with the Company’s Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Ken Starrett.


If you asked Ken Starrett, vice president of sales and marketing at American Excelsior, last March how he thought the business would perform in 2020, he’d probably give a pretty different answer than today.

In just a few short months after COVID-19 hit the U.S., American Excelsior went from handling a significant slowdown within their U.S.-based flexible foam plants to landing record-breaking sales that far exceeded any of the company’s previous sales years throughout its 133-year history.

What was their secret?

“Product diversity and having multiple plants has helped us get through these challenges better than many of our competitors,” Starrett explains.

But American Excelsior didn’t learn how to be versatile in the face of business-threatening challenges overnight. Each of American Excelsior’s three divisions, including Flexible Foam, Wood Fiber, and Erosion Control, was developed in response to growing demand and changing sourcing activity trends throughout the company’s history.

Thomas Insights sat down with Starrett, who has now been with the company for 50 years, to get a look behind the scenes of how the company’s Flexible Foam operations became so successful — even during a global pandemic. Continue Reading . . .


PDF Version: American Excelsior Spotlight – PDF