Tru-Tone Finishing Inc., a family-owned provider of industrial electrocoating, plans to create 120 jobs as it establishes a Lexington, Kentucky, facility.
Tru-Tone offers ecoat, powder coating and other finishing processes for a variety of industrial clients from its two existing locations. The company will initially implement an ecoat metalfinishing process to serve the surrounding region at an existing 70,000-square-foot building on Baker Court. Tru-Tone representatives expect that line to open this summer, with powder coating capabilities added in 2019. Ultimately the Lexington plant will operate three 35-employee shifts.
“We have been targeting locations that will allow us to serve our existing customers, as well as expand our business in the Southeast, and Kentucky lets us to do that,” says company President Greg Klemenswicz, a member of the second generation of family ownership. “The Lexington facility also made it possible to reach parts of the Midwest and East. We are very excited to be growing and building on our relationships with companies in the region and to become a part of the city and state business communities.”
Klemenswicz said a large part of Tru-Tone’s business will initially come from automotive suppliers, but will eventually include a mix of general industrial clients. The facility will also offer some limited support activities, including part washing and finishing.
Klemenswicz’s parents, Dennis and Elizabeth, founded Tru-Tone in 1986 in Addison, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. Employment grew from 15 to 60 in just a few years. That growth led to a doubling of the facility’s size to 80,000 square feet.
The company opened a Brownsville, Texas ecoating facility in 2012 to serve burgeoning automotive business on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. That three-shift operation employs 80 people, and the Addison plant currently employs about 120. Klemenswicz and his sister Lori Ard acquired the company in 2015.