Ashley Mellen remembers the moment when the impact of her family business hit home. She was at Boston University, where she received two chemistry degrees, and had introduced herself to a professor.
“He said: Mellen? Are you Mellen of the Mellen Company?” she said. It was a real ego trip, admits the 27-year-old, who is now vice president of the firm.
The Mellen Co. Inc. has been in the Concord area since the 1960s but don’t feel ashamed if you don’t recognize the name. I only learned of it this summer while perusing a list of state companies getting federal contracts. I saw a mysterious Concord company getting $47,195 for “Crystal Growth System” from the National Institute of Standards, leading me to mutter “What is that all about?”
Here is what it’s about: Designing and building very high-temperature ovens for specialized processes used in industrial manufacturing and also in research, which is why the BU professor was familiar with the brand.
The furnaces are “essentially just a big resistor,” said Mellen. They run lots of electricity (up to 15,000 watts) through wires until they heat up inside enough insulation, often ceramic, that the outside can be touched even at maximum power.
The resulting heat causes phase changes – melting or some other atomic dances – in crystals or metals or polymers or whatever the customer is working with, as needed in a variety of industrial applications.
The company’s specialty is making specialized furnaces, some as small as a version joking called the “Coke can” furnace, some large enough that they have to be broken into parts in order to be shipped, often overseas, costing as little as $2,000 and as much as six figures. They have more than 50 different furnace lines, 12 of which are standardized and the rest customizable.
“Our bread and butter is up to about 1,350 C, but we also sell up to 2,800 C,” Mellen said. (That’s roughly 2,500 to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit for us non-metric folks.) “Our competitive advantage is a customer can say I have a 10-inch (item) and need it to 1,200 C – can you make it happen? And we make a customer design from that. …We can make a hexagonal furnace, a star shape if we want to.”
The company was founded on Concord’s State Street in 1966 by Mellen’s grandfather, Bob, who developed a new high-temperature furnace for crystal growth. During processing the crystal often has to receive different temperatures at different places along the sample and at different times. This had been done by physically moving the sample within the furnace, or moving the furnace around the sample, but Mellen developed a system called electro-dynamic gradient to do this without moving anything. That technology is still a centerpiece of the company’s business.
The company has moved or expanded a couple of times since then, first to the Webster site on Battle Street where it still operates and then building the Concord plant on Chennell Drive.
Mellen Co. inc. is part of a piece of New Hampshire’s economy that is invisible to most of us: The hundreds of small, specialized manufacturing firms that are tucked away in industrial parks or repurposed warehouses. Few of these are big enough to be noticed but in aggregate they are important. New Hampshire has almost three times as many jobs in manufacturing as it does in construction, mining and logging combined.
About 25 of those jobs, give or take a few, are at the two Mellen Co. Inc. plants where production has generally recovered from the effect of pandemic-related shutdowns.
These are true manufacturing facilities, not just assembly plants. They take raw materials like sheet metal and spools of wire and do all the cutting, bending, welding, forming and painting. Equipment in the factories ranges from 3-D printers for prototyping and making of small components to a punch press the size of my first apartment.
Gazing at one large furnace being prepared for shipment, the only thing Mellen could see that they didn’t manufacture in-house were the locking latches. “Over the years we’ve found that’s the only way to assure quality control,” she said.
Five decades of family ownership has other advantages. Furnaces have a long life so it’s common for customers to need work on models that haven’t been made for years, which is less of a problem than it might seem.
“We haven’t obsoleted any model. We can scrounge up hand-drawn schematics,” she said. “We had a system sent for rehab that was shipped in 1983 – it was very cool to see. We found some sketches in a folder but we had to rework them. Our methods are updated but they’re updated consistently.”
The Mellen Co. Inc. is a classic multi-generation family business: Jon Mellen, son of the founder, is CEO and his wife, Daniela, has been involved in such things as writing manuals. “At holiday dinner mom has to put a hold on work talk,” he said.
The third-generation company official, Ashley Mellen, has been around the factories since she was a little girl.
“People here have seen me grow up through the years. Some have worked here longer than I’ve been alive,” she said.
The chief operating officer, Lisa Walter, has been with the firm for 24 years and smiled fondly when asked about the early days of the company’s current vice president.
Ashley Mellen says she wasn’t sure she wanted to go into the business, hence the chemistry degrees instead of an obvious route like mechanical engineering, and had no pressure from the family to do so. But she says the job is satisfying and fun not, just because of what it does every day but in looking for new markets.
One potential new market, Walter said, is “smart clothing,” which weaves wires into the fabric to enable everything from heating to communication to posture control. Creating specialty wires for such products could require specialty furnaces.
(David Brooks can be reached at (603) 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
