40 years later, polyurethane firm still a 'job shop'

View larger image Tom Heitfield, vice president of finance at Creative Urethanes, stands by a production line where worker Yvonne Sigler puts labels on the company's patented skateboard wheels. Dennis Grundman/Daily

By James Heffernan -- jheffernan@nvdaily.com

WINCHESTER -- As a boy growing up in Purcellville in the early 1960s, Tom Heitfield was rarely without a pair of roller skates strapped to his feet.

"There was a skating rink in town, and my friends and I went often enough that we had our own skates," he recalls.

But the wheels, which in those days were mostly made of wood, were a magnet for dirt and grime and didn't hold up well on concrete.

At the time, Heitfield's father Vernon, an electrical engineer, was discovering polyurethane, having first encountered the synthetic material -- which has properties of both rubber and plastic -- when his employer was developing an underground antenna for the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

"He would bring some of the stuff home in a can and start molding it," Heitfield remembers.

After a few trials in the garage, his father had crafted a set of durable roller skating wheels. It wasn't long before Heitfield's friends took notice and were placing orders of their own.

"He was thrilled," Heitfield says.

Heitfield's father continued to tinker with new uses for polyurethane, making jump cups for horse rails and feed buckets for Loudoun County farmers. With the help of his brother in Jacksonville, Fla., he secured a contract to supply wheels for a local skating rink.

By the late 1960s, Vernon Heitfield's engineering firm in Leesburg had folded, and he needed a job. Not wanting to move his family, he accepted a $10,000 loan from his partner in Florida, borrowed some production equipment and in 1970 started his own company, Creative Urethanes.

As the roller skating craze continued in the '70s, demand for the polyurethane wheels grew, and the business had to relocate from the family basement, first to an abandoned cleaners in town, then to an old dairy barn and slaughterhouse.

Tom Heitfield swept the floors while he was in high school, and after graduating college in 1975, he returned home to help his dad run the business. When the barn burned down in 1983, the company rebuilt a 25,000-square-foot production facility on the 3-acre site.

Over the years, as Creative Urethanes gained experience and expertise in polyurethane casting, it diversified into other products and services, including injection molding.

In 2007, the company moved to an industrial park on Independence Drive, east of Winchester. Now run by Tom Heitfield and his brother Richard, it still makes custom urethane wheels, mostly for skateboards -- about 40 percent of its total production -- using essentially the same technology Vernon Heitfield developed 40 years ago.

"We're still pretty much a job shop," Tom Heitfield says of the business, which currently employs about two dozen workers, down from 50 a few years ago due to the sagging economy.

In addition to wheels, the company makes piping for mining operations and wastewater plants, seals for swimming pools, spa rails, scuba fins and covers for medical devices. It prides itself on being able to create custom products for its customers, carrying on Vernon Heitfield's original vision, "If you can draw it, we can build it."

"Dad was a problem-solver," Tom Heitfield says.

Recently, the company was one of 18 in the state to graduate from the Virginia Economic Development Partnership's Accessing International Markets program. Since its inception in December 2005, the AIM program has helped 77 new-to-export companies adopt an effective approach to selling their products and services internationally, according to VEDP.

"We hope to begin some exporting business after the first of the year," Tom Heitfield says, adding, "Companies are a little hesitant to spend right now because they're unsure about the economy."

Richard Heitfield will be traveling to Europe this month to meet with potential customers.