In his 18 years of serving Barton County, first as a congressman and now as a senator, Jerry Moran had never set foot in Fuller Brush. He rectified that Monday afternoon.
“I’m here to see the success,” the veteran Republican lawmaker said. He referred to the December 2012 purchase of Fuller’s production business by local investors.
Moran toured the Fuller Industries plant west of Great Bend while on a whirlwind visit to central Kansas. He had already made stops in LaCrosse and Hays and was headed to Manhattan.
Brady Gros, Fuller Industries president and CEO, along with investors Rick Ball and Norbert Schneider, guided Moran through the cavernous 500,000-plus-square-foot labyrinth that is Fuller Brush. They talked as they moved among the machines, conveyor belts and stacks of pallets.
“Great Bend has several examples of local folks coming together,” Moran said of the Fuller sale. The action is credited with keeping the plant in Great Bend when others were looking to move the operation out of state.
As they walked, discussion turned to problems faced by Fuller. Chief among these are the availability of professional employees, the search for which is hampered by a severe lack of housing in the community, Ball said.
Another concern were the many federal regulations that have made doing business more difficult, Ball said.
In December 2012, Fuller Industries LLC officially took possession of the former Fuller Brush Company’s manufacturing and distribution facility in Great Bend, as part of a bankruptcy settlement bid to purchase all property and industrial business segments, which included the custom brush and commercial janitorial supply businesses. The purchase was the product of an effort to keep Fuller in Great Bend by a consortium of local investors.
While Fuller Industries handles the production, a sister company in Napa, Calif.,  handles the marketing under the Fuller Brush Company brand.
In February 2012, Fuller’s Leicester, N.Y.,-based then parent company CPAC filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Fuller Brush’s assets and debts each amounted to between $10 million and $50 million and Fuller had 185 employees at the time of the filing, 180 of which are at the Great Bend plant.
The reason for the filing, company officials said, was to bring an infusion of needed capital into the struggling company.
There are several divisions of CPAC, each of which were sold separately. Fuller Brush was one of these.
Fuller Brush, founded in Connecticut in 1906 by Alfred C. Fuller and famous for its door-to-door “Fuller Brush Man” sales force, now sells personal care and household cleaning products directly and through retailers.
The Fuller facility sits on 123.46 acres at the corner of 10th and Airport roads wests of Great Bend. The plant was built in 1973.
Great Bend Chamber of Commerce President Jan Peters, who was also on the tour, said the senator’s office contacted local officials requesting a visit to Fuller Brush.