New England Electropolishing owners Amy Prigmore and Luke Almeida have never been into chasing shiny objects.
Their latest endeavor has been downright dull, if you must know.
After a few doctors and surgeons complained to equipment manufacturers that polished scalpels and other medical instruments often gave off a glare in the bright lights of an operating room, New England Electropolishing was tasked with solving the issue.
They recently developed a proprietary product called ElectroMatte that produced a non-reflective matte finish yet meets ASTM Standards for electropolishing and passivation while producing a non-reflective matte finish.
“ElectroMatte deburrs and passivates parts while offering precision removal rates,” says Prigmore, the company’s CEO and sister to Almeida, the COO. They both are the children of Alvin Almeida, the late founder of NEE.
“That was at the surgeons' request,” she says. They were getting too much reflectivity from the surgical devices, and it was interfering with their performance. We created a dull finish instead of the bright, shiny, traditional electropolished finish.”
Preparing for its 40th Year as an Electropolisher
Luke Almeida and Amy Prigmore are second generation owners of New England Electropolishing.For the Fall River, Massachusetts, company getting ready to celebrate its 40th year next year, the medical industry accounts for about half of all its work at its 17,500-square-foot facility with 35 full-time employees.
And the name says it all: New England Electropolishing is electropolishing only through and through, a specialty that gives them a leg up on other finishing shops that do a variety of electroplating and surface finishing processes.
But Prigmore and Almeida do not take that for granted with their customers.
“We certainly have a healthy level of competition in the Northeast,” Almeida says. "There are three shops that we compete with, and I would say they may not specialize in it quite as distinctly as we do, but they certainly have expertise and capacity.”
But New England Electropolishing was founded as an electropolisher, and that gives it an edge when customers often want specialized work done on its parts. Almeida says staying in that finishing lane has benefitted them over the past four decades.
“Our competitors certainly can play in that field, and they have good reputations, good lead times, and decent quality, but there are still a lot of platers who have electropolishing as a secondary service and might not have as much capacity as we do,” he says.
It is also clear that other finishers may not have the expertise that NEE has, nor the “customer service and the bandwidth” that Almeida says they have built up over the last 40 years performing the singular process. Customers have noticed this and have continued to stay with the company.
“That's where we shine with those folks,” Almeida says with no pun intended. “We've got capacity, we've got expertise, and we have a commitment to customer satisfaction and delivering on that every single order. It's not just, ‘Okay, we're going to get an order from our new customer, and we're going to treat them well for a month, and then we're going to forget about them.’ We want to treat everybody the same daily, from Day 1, throughout our partnership with them.”
Longtime Customers Remain the Mainstay of the Business
New England Electropolishing is electropolishing only through and through, a specialty that gives them a leg up on other finishing shops that do a variety of electroplating and surface finishing processes.Since their father founded the company in 1985, many of its customers have stayed with NEE, some even for decades. The quality, expertise, and customer service have been a huge selling point.
Prigmore says she was recently reviewing a list of their top 20 customers and realized that seven have been with them for more than 20 years, and an additional eight have been NEE customers for 10 or more years.
“We're looking for those very long-term relationships where it's more of a partnership for each of us,” she says. “Usually, we are getting either the lion's share or all of a company's business, and we maintain that by trying to service the heck out of them.”
That can often be a challenge since parts that arrive at New England Electropolishing’s loading dock are at their final leg in the manufacturing process, and the customers are usually very eager to have them finished and sent to market. Time is money, and the demand on NEE to complete its finishing process quickly, while meeting precision specifications, is often a challenge for any finisher.
“We grew up with the business, especially since it was in our house.”
“We know we are the last stop, just like every plater knows that they are the last stop,” Prigmore says. "So all the lead time that has been taken up through other delays, customers look to take from our schedule. We know it, and we are comfortable with it to some degree. They need to service their customers and maintain their wonderful relationships, and we are very clear about the pecking order and what we need to do in that symbiotic relationship.”
For Prigmore and Almeida, the finishing industry has been in their blood — and at times in their dining room growing up — for just as long as New England Electropolishing has been around.
Foundation to Electropolish Small Parts with High Quality
NEE recently developed a proprietary product called ElectroMatte that produced a non-reflective matte finish yet meets ASTM Standards for electropolishing and passivation while producing a non-reflective matte finish.Their father, Alvin Almeida, had been selling electropolishing chemicals to finishing companies in the Northeast for many years when he noticed that finishers did a good job of electropolishing large vessels but had trouble finishing smaller parts with a consistently high level of quality.
In 1985, Al and his wife, Jeannine, started their finishing company to fill that need. He hired the former finishing manager of F.B. Rogers Silver Co., in Taunton, MA, and the two gents began recruiting customers who needed electropolishing service.
Both of Al and Jeannine’s children recall the birth of the company, which largely operated in the Almeida’s dining room.
Al Almeida kept his day job distributing chemicals, and New England Electropolishing had just two employees who performed the work Al brought to them. One day, all the perseverance and determination paid off when Boston-based Gillette approached NEE to produce a holiday edition of its Sensor Razor. The work was so good Gillette kept coming back and placing orders; at one point, NEE was doing 60,000 parts a week for the company on a tight deadline.
“He kept his full-time job to pay the bills and was doing the electropolishing work at night,” Prigmore says of her father. “Although he did have a couple employees, he would go hardcore on the weekends with the assistance of friends and relatives. Dad was extremely fortunate to have a lot of support at the time.”
Luke Almeida was just six when his dad started the company, but he recalls vividly how hard his mother and father worked to get it going.
“We want more business. It's a really exciting spot where we're not worried about tipping the balance by bringing on too much and not knowing how to get it out.”
“We grew up with the business, especially since it was in our house,” he says. “I remember our laundry room held our accounts receivable and accounts payable records, and our dining room was the office. We had a typewriter and an IBM computer, and our mother was involved in helping get it started. It was all around you, even if you weren't in the shop. I remember him taking us to the shop on the weekends or evenings.
Over time, NEE grew along with its reputation for quality and fast turnaround of high-volume small parts. In 1995, the company purchased its current 17,500-square-foot building on Shove Street in Fall River.
Alvin Almeida stayed involved in New England Electropolishing until early 2019, when he passed away.
12 Electropolishing Lines and Increased Efficiencies
The company is now both ISO 9001 and ISO 13485 certified, which are coveted designations that underscore the company’s core values. New England Electropolishing now has 12 electropolishing lines, and Luke Almeida says the processes have never been more efficient than right now. Quality has always been a hallmark of their operations, and in 1996, they became one of the first metal finishers in the U.S. to achieve ISO 9002 Registration.
The company is now both ISO 9001 and ISO 13485 certified, which are coveted designations that underscore the company’s core values. Its attention to detail and the qualifications have presented several benefits to NEE.
“We have quality systems in place that provide the framework for an excellent track record,” Almeida says. “The work comes in and goes out, but it also makes us nimble with our existing customers. And when new opportunities come in with some of these established players on the market, if they fumble or they are missing delivery times — and we saw this a lot during COVID —we were able to onboard some major accounts while not sacrificing our existing customers who count on us every single day.”
Almeida says it is a matter of being mindful not to overpromise but still being aggressive and pursuing new business. NEE is focused on growing its footprint in the electropolishing space. Even though it has a good base of existing business, Almeida says it has more capacity available.
"We want more business, and I am still making sales calls to customers or to prospects to push this forward,” he says. “It's a really exciting spot where we're not worried about tipping the balance by bringing on too much and not knowing how to get it out.”
Growth in Semiconductor Business
Operations Manager Imad Jaber is responsible for ensuring that the shop consistently delivers high-quality services on customers’ timelines. While the medical industry has been the largest industry for decades, NEE is also seeing its semiconductor business grow even faster. Prigmore says that in the last 8 - 10 years, the semiconductor segment has grown as rapidly as ever.
“We have a couple of lines dedicated to our semiconductor business,” she says.
NEE certainly has a seasoned manager involved with its operations, who has enabled both Prigmore and Almeida to work to bring in additional customers.
Imad Jaber is the Operations Manager at NEE and is responsible for ensuring that the shop consistently delivers high-quality services on customers’ timelines. Jaber, who directly supervises every new electropolishing job that runs through the plant, joined NEE in 2010 after working for 25 years at the former Lindberg Heat Treating, which became Bodycote.
"Electropolishing is a science and an art,” Jaber says. “By combining both, we meet customer’s exact finishing requirements, whether the order is one part or 100,000. Our customers tell us no one does stainless steel electropolishing better.”
Savath San oversees the quality control functions and supports continuous compliance.Savath San is NEE’s Quality Manager, where he oversees the quality control functions, supports continuous compliance, and ensures the integrity of the company’s quality management systems. A native of Cambodia, San joined NEE in 2022 after more than 15 years of combined experience as a Quality Manager at CPS Technologies and LeachGarner.
There have been times when Prigmore and Almeida say they have contemplated adding services other than electropolishing — such as plating and anodizing capabilities — but in the end, it didn’t make much sense to detour from what they know best.
“Occasionally, it has come up, but I would say from my perspective, it was never serious enough to explore further,” Almeida says. And there has always been enough electropolishing business. Throughout my time here, I've talked about adding a value-added service like laser marking or anodizing, but we've always decided to do what we do, and it's treated us well for nearly 40 years.”
Successful Transition to 2nd Generation
Luke and Amy Almeida say the way their father allowed them to assume more control of New England Electropolishing was appreciated.Besides, they want to stay true to Alvin Almeida’s dream of building the best electropolishing business in the U.S. Before his passing, their father gradually transitioned control of the company to his children, who had spent so many years growing up working production lines, performing quality checks, packing boxes, delivering to customers, and doing clerical work.
“Between the two of us, there is no job at NEE that we haven’t done,” Prigmore says.
Luke Almeida says the way their father allowed them to assume more control of New England Electropolishing was appreciated, and even more so today.
“Over time, he let more and more go. It was a great blessing from him that he allowed us to cut our teeth and make decisions,” he says. “He was very respectful. He allowed us to operate independently, but we had the opportunity to consult him on tricky issues. It was a great confidence builder for both of us.”
