ANNOUNCER: Major funding for “Made in Maryland” is provided by... Offering big-bank capabilities and boutique-bank care, CFG Bank supports businesses of all sizes and industries, including manufacturing, across Maryland.

We are CFG Bank.

Your success is our business.

This program is in part made possible through a partnership with Kaiser Permanente, which has been serving the Maryland community with high-quality health care for over 35 years.

The Maryland Marketing Partnership amplifies all that makes Maryland a great place to live, work, and do business in, including our bright minds, diverse population, and connectivity.

Learn more at business.maryland.gov.

Chesapeake Employers Insurance, proud to support "Made in Maryland" and the exciting future for manufacturing in Maryland.

And by... NARRATOR: From school sports fields to professional stadiums, quality equipment can give an athlete an edge.

In Maryland, three companies are helping turn competitors into winners.

Savage River canoes, ECD Lacrosse sticks, and Made Plus shoes give Maryland athletes the home field advantage by creating custom products that combine decades of expertise and high-end craftsmanship into a story that begins long before the opening whistle.

In Maryland, where lacrosse has long been part of the community and culture, ECD Lacrosse is a family-run company focused on the game's future.

MIKE KENNEALLY: We are a lacrosse brand that does basically everything out of our headquarters here in Towson, Maryland, soon to be Hunt Valley, Maryland, from marketing to product development to on-field testing of designing products, mainly heads, mesh, and shafts for lacrosse players.

GREG KENNEALLY: Many people have the same baseball bat, many have the same hockey stick, but no two people have the same lacrosse pocket.

Stringing is a very unique part of lacrosse.

There's not another sport where you're customizing the gear to that level.

You can change the parameters of a pocket in countless ways, so it is a complex part of the sport.

MIKE: It takes a long time to go from concept sketch of a lacrosse head to the actual finished product.

It'll take about two years.

This is the process of how a lacrosse head is designed.

So, it starts in Brian's notebook.

He starts to do concept sketches.

This one's a defensive head.

Then he'll move on to some more official renderings and designs in which the engineers get involved.

We start to talk about specs like weight, stiffness, durability.

And so, we'll pick a final concept from there.

We'll go and do our final concept sketch where all the details get put in of what the head's gonna look like.

Engineers will take that and they'll create a 3D design, which then we use to create the tooling for the head.

During that process, we'll do different 3D prints to start to tweak areas and how it looks.

And then we'll also pick a name, design the logo, design the ball stop and the packaging, and then we'll have a tool that is ready to produce parts in the end.

The two parts of the mold will close in the injection molding machine.

It'll take about a minute to pump the head full of plastic, and then a finished head will pop out of the tool.

This is a batch of heads that just came in today that were made up in Aberdeen.

Then we'll start the process, and it'll go into our R&D lab, and it'll go through a quality control process to make sure that the head is up to spec according to different rules bodies.

So, USA Lacrosse, the NFHS is high school, and NCAA does college.

After the heads go through quality control, they'll go to the back of the warehouse where they are stored.

So, this is where we store all of our different heads that are ready to be strung and then go into packaging.

Today we're gonna do the Rebel Offense White.

So, we'll start with the USA mesh, which is red, white, and blue.

We can make all different types of patterns and colors.

This is a semi-soft mesh.

So, once you string it up, it'll be ready to break in, ready to play.

So, I just grabbed the shooting strings, which will help control the release of the ball and the tension that's in the pocket.

And now we'll grab the sidewall and top string, which will help attach the mesh to the head.

This is our stringing lounge, where we also string lacrosse heads, but we'll also quality control them.

So, the heads go through the process where you string in the top string and the sidewall string and then put in the shooters and the bottom string.

And then they'll go through a break-in process here.

And then they'll go on to quality control as well to make sure that they get a certain score.

They'll go through on to packaging.

So, the next step in the process is the head comes to packaging.

Emmett runs packaging for us.

All right, Emmett, time to package it up.

EMMETT: Sounds good.

Thanks, Mike.

Well, you want to make sure the end cap is on the right way, so the crab is facing out.

Ball stop goes in there.

Put it on the shaft.

MIKE: Once Emmett's done assembling the stick, he'll take it up to shipping to ship out to the customer.

Lacrosse was really started by Native Americans who call it the Creator's Game.

Sticks were made out of wood and different leathers and things they had, and it was played to train for war.

GREG: We grew up in Lutherville, and our dad introduced us to lacrosse early.

We were about five, which is about the norm for players in Maryland.

People are surprised to hear that when they come here from other states.

MIKE: We might not look like it, but we're also twins, so we always played the same team growing up.

GREG: And we ended up playing together in high school, and we also went to the same college and played together there.

MIKE: It was fun playing different positions.

It was always fun playing with each other.

GREG: Mike and I experienced as a whole career with the mesh just being not quite as good as we needed and how important the pocket is.

So, I kind of came up with this wax formula, and I had the Crockpot that I would mix the wax mesh up in and make a couple batches and bring it back up and see if I could sell it.

At that point, I had built some small semblance of a website myself somehow.

We knew almost nothing.

But the mesh was good, and at that time, people were really looking for something better, so word spread quickly.

MIKE: In the spring of 2012, Greg was basically running this on his own.

So, we were coaching lacrosse in grad school at Towson, and we were working tax season at our dad's accounting firm.

And so, then he would come back after coaching lacrosse and stay up till, like, 2:00 in the morning making the wax mesh.

So after tax season was done, I went to him.

I was like, "Hey, looks like you need some help with this thing."

GREG: We have very complimentary but separate skill sets, and so Mike brought some well-needed organization and structure to the business.

MIKE: And really, at that point in time, it was just a glorified hobby and side hustle.

We didn't really think it would turn into the business that it had turned into now.

It was just fun to work in lacrosse and make a lacrosse product.

GREG: Although we're twins, we split things up in a way that makes sense.

MIKE: In some ways, I always assumed that we would work together.

I just assumed that would be in accounting.

Before we were born, our dad started his own accounting firm in Towson, Maryland.

We were, like, five or six, going in there and shredding papers on the weekend.

So, the grand plan is that we were going to get our master's at Towson, become CPAs, but did not end up ever going to go work for an accounting firm.

GREG: Everyone talks about starting a business in your passion, and so we're very fortunate to have fallen into that situation.

It was never something that we talked about growing up.

It was certainly my dream to work in lacrosse.

I was always tinkering with the gear already, and it doesn't really feel much like work most days.

MIKE: And we have a great team here that has helped build this company.

We have about 30 people here between full and part-time, with marketing, sales, engineering, shipping fulfillment, production and assembly, and stringing staff.

Alex started here about two months ago.

Alex used all of our products growing up and was actually living in Vermont and applied online and decided to move down here to Maryland to work at this company.

ALEX DAIGNEAUL: I had a degree in economics and a minor in education.

So, I went back to my old high school and was a para-educator there for a year, working with multilingual students, helping them through their classes throughout the day.

And coached the lacrosse team as an assistant coach as well.

It was really tough to walk away from that, but it was a step that I felt like I, I needed to take to branch out and do something new.

And now I'm able to work face-to-face with a bunch of different people who come from a bunch of different places, have their own styles of stringing, their own opinions on how to do things.

And so it's a very collaborative environment.

It's a very good place to learn.

I would tell someone that manufacturing is definitely something that can be really rewarding if you like putting things together.

Working at a desk and staring at a computer isn't for everybody, and definitely not me, so that's why this is perfect.

MIKE: We own the company 100%.

We really don't have any driven goals to do anything different.

We really enjoy working in the sport.

We really enjoy coming to work every single day.

GREG: The future for ECD is to continue to push innovation and use our passion to make the best lacrosse products we can, and so we'll take that as far as the market will let us, as far as we feel like we can add competitive advantage to our products, and just continue to try to make them better for the players to have a better experience.

NARRATOR: ECD's success grew from a passion for the sport and the know-how to improve it.

The same spirit drives Savage River Works in Garrett County, where craftsmanship and a love of paddling have built a loyal following far beyond Maryland.

BEN DILLER: We manufacture high-end canoes, mostly racing canoes for marathon racing.

JOHN DILLER: We focus on craftsmanship and also customization.

We don't mass produce.

I see myself as a craftsman building, uh, a beautiful piece of art.

It's great to do more niche boats with smaller quantities, and it's a lot more fun, 'cause we're not just knocking out the same thing every day.

BEN: We build to order, so the customer reaches out to us, and we have to figure out exactly what's the best haul, and layup, and outfitting for each boat.

For the racing boats, especially in the Northeast for marathon racing canoes, they can only be so long, and then they have to be so wide.

Our canoes are designed to get as quickly as possible within those specs at those races.

The best part's when somebody comes in to pick up a boat, and they, uh, they get really excited.

That always feels good.

JOHN: For me, the best part, I think, is the design process, trying to come up with a faster boat.

BEN: There's 20 to 30 models, and each one of those has a mold.

And because of the customization work, there's generally between 40 and 70 man-hours in each boat.

JOHN: In our canoes, we use a lot of carbon fiber.

We also use Kevlar.

The carbon fiber and the Kevlar has been around for a long time.

We're probably one of the first canoe manufacturers to incorporate the two together, and, and putting the carbon on the outside.

When I design a, a canoe on the computer, the computer will only do so much.

I have to do the input as to what I want.

The computer will spit some numbers out at me as far as the hydrodynamics, and the drag, and everything, and there's different formulas and stuff it'll go through.

It helps a lot.

But what determines a good canoe, and as far as a racing canoe, you gotta get people in it, you gotta get good racers in it.

And that's the only way to really determine whether it's a good canoe.

JOHN: This is the fabric that we use in the canoes.

This is the basic carbon fiber, which is the standard.

Uh, and then the Kevlar is the yellow fabric.

This is Nathan.

He's our layup man.

He's cutting it so it fits in the bottom over top of the foam rib.

He's working on this solo racing canoe, and he has a couple of layers of fabric in.

He now has the foam in the floor, and he's bending these ribs to go in up the sides.

It's kind of a skeletal structure so that it makes a really stiff canoe.

NATHAN: I gather them all up to bevel the edges.

Gluing the, uh, the ribs into place, it's kind of like a temporary hold before the final pour.

What I love most about manufacturing of, of the canoes here at Savage River is seeing the final product.

It's, it's really amazing just to see the beauty and, and sometimes the uniqueness of some of these boats.

So this right here is the rail that goes on top of the ribs to stabilize the, the boat.

It's made out of foam with a carbon sleeve on it.

Just using some glue to temporarily, uh, attach the rail to the ribs.

And then when the pour is done, it will hold everything together permanently.

JOHN: This is the cured boat.

Now time to pop it out of the mold.

So, what they're doing is, uh, loosening up the flange right now.

You can kind of hear it as it releases.

Now they're just splitting it with a wedge.

We're gonna lift the boat right out of the mold right now.

There it is.

There's a brand-new fresh boat.

Tandem racing canoe.

Andrew is now gonna peel this, uh, peel ply off, uh, the edge, and then he's gonna grind this edge off so that it makes a nice smooth edge for the gunnel.

So, Andrew got this all sanded up real nice.

Gonna go ahead and put a center bulkhead in because these boats have to jig at a certain point.

They're 27 inches wide at the 3-inch waterline.

He finds this, the widest point is right down here, so he's... ANDREW: See how it rocks?

That means we gotta push the rails out.

JOHN: So put a spacer in there to push it away so he can make a jig.

ANDREW: It has to be this way.

Little more.

All right, that's good JOHN: You good?

ANDREW: Yep.

Little gap.

JOHN: Perfect.

The sanding is getting ready to clear coat.

The clear coat's just the last coating that goes on top of it to, uh, help protect it.

ANDREW: And this is just getting all the loose stuff JOHN: What I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna install a seat in the back end of this canoe.

I have the tubes; they're already cut and ready to roll.

I have the seat, it's all ready.

It's got the seat pad on it.

So, I just gotta drill some holes in here, bring it back, put it on here, center it up, and, and screw it down.

So, we have a seat.

I've always had a love for canoes, so I built my own.

I started out in the vo-tech high school for carpentry.

I started my own carpentry business remodeling when I was about 21.

Started building the paddles and then went into the canoes.

I was actually originally a white-water kayaker, and I moved to Garrett County because I was closer to white water and the things I love to do.

And for some reason, I started building flat water canoes.

And so, we are building flat water canoes in white water country.

BEN: Yeah.

JOHN: Which is kinda crazy, but it works.

But my biggest success is I was too dumb to know when to quit... so I kept going.

And the other thing that I have to credit is I pray a lot, and I think there's a lot of divine inter-intervention that helped out.

BEN: I kinda grew up with all the boats.

Me and my brother, we, we would go down and help my dad when we were, like, a couple years old.

I went to school for graphic design, so after I graduated, then I came back.

I've had a lot of people experience.

Bringing that as well as the graphic design, I could bring to Savage River to help out.

I've been doing the marketing and the sales for Dad for, uh, 13, 14 years now.

JOHN: It was great when Ben came along 'cause I turned the office part to him, and I could focus more on, on building canoes.

BEN: It's more of an art for him, but for me, I see it as always like, uh, producing.

Dad's made a pretty awesome product.

We put a lot of effort into them, and it'll be nice to carry on his legacy.

JOHN: Being in the business for 40 years and being able to sit here with my son, it feels real good.

BEN: I'm hoping to be able to expand and to grow the company, especially in the recreational side.

It's looking promising for the, the next generation here to move forward.

JOHN: It's pretty neat to see that Ben's gonna take it over and, and he's gonna continue... what I started.

NARRATOR: Savage River Works puts decades of passion and experience into every canoe they design and build, shaping their success.

In Annapolis, Made Plus is reshaping footwear manufacturing by addressing industry waste and handcrafting custom athletic shoes from sustainable materials.

ALAN GUYAN: Made Plus manufactures sustainable footwear focused on active lifestyle.

We chose boating and pickleball.

The boating community, we're naturally in Annapolis, where we consider the heritage and innovation hub of the boating community or the sailing community.

And then pickleball being the fastest growing sport in the US, it just made a natural extension from our sailing product.

All of them have a little bit of the bells and whistles when it comes to technology, and they all have the same sustainable cues, and all made here in Maryland.

The big deal I think most people don't know about us is that we are trying to change the way shoes are made and the way they're consumed and the way they're disposed of.

We also see the upsides of being a little bit more conscious of what we buy and how we buy it and why we buy it.

Sustainability has always been a core aspect of how I design and build product.

For example, we take water bottles and we convert that to yarn that we re-twist up here, and then we make it to a beautiful knit upper that now you're gonna wear on your foot.

When we sought out to design the products for sailing and pickleball, the construction is of course similar, but it also needs the same support mechanisms that you would see in advanced sailing racing and in pickleball.

So, the extension was kind of already bridged there.

The manufacturing methods that we use here between on-demand and small batch runs naturally allow us to not have overproduction.

Once again, waste reduction, because in, in this business there's a performance aspect of it, but there's a heavy fashion aspect of it.

Fast fashion, we've seen the, the, the downfalls of that.

We've also seen the downfalls of having too many colors.

Color alone is the plague of death in my opinion, because some people don't want to buy a turquoise shoe or a pink shoe, but they'll definitely resonate with a gray shoe.

Color for people who want a pink or a turquoise shoe without being committed to like this overproduction model or shoes that won't sell 'cause it's a certain color.

So, we just brought on customization.

Design process we always start with, and we move that into the design for modeling.

That's where the real hard work up front starts but also starts with some variables we already know.

For example, a shoe last.

Last is, should be called the first, but it's the most important aspect of shoe making.

Once that's confirmed, the design process happens along with the digital modeling, which is your virtualization or sampling.

Before we can make our flat knit uppers for our footwear products, we have to twist the yarn here.

We take a raw good yarn from our supplier, we re-twist it, put our special sauce on it, and here you can see we have a heather where we took three, uh, navies and one gray to create that unique product.

We take this cone of yarn and convert it into a flat knit upper.

All our waste yarn is right here in this little collar piece, and other than it clipping out a few pieces.

After the knitting process, we still have to continue to condition our upper.

We do this by steaming, pressing, and resting.

Steaming process reduces the overall size by a third.

So, it's very, very important that we get this right.

Uh, as we steam it and press it, it'll start taking shape, and then they'll eventually start processing it for the next operation.

After our shoe uppers are complete at resting, we have to bring them over here.

We put our eye stays on here that we've cut from scratch.

We take our overlay components that we've lasered out on our lasering machine and then stitched them on and bond them as well.

And it starts completing the package of our full finished shoe upper.

Our no-sew operation is complete with our reinforcers and eye stay and size tag now put on the shoe.

Now it's time to convert the shoe into a three-dimensional shape.

The heels, toe, strobel on the bottom, create a pullover bootie that gets put on the last.

This is a back part molding machine.

So, you can see extreme heat and extreme chill.

So, the heat will loosen up the fibers, create the molding operation, and the chill will set that shape.

Here you can see it's all put together.

Got our Strobel on the bottom, and now it's time to re-last it on our last.

Last is actually the foot form that goes inside of our shoe.

We last it, looks something like this.

Now we bring the rubber outsole together and start bonding this thing to be a final shoe.

We take our lasted upper and our rubber outsole and go ahead and bond it together.

And now we press it, and then we'll chill it.

So now the shoe's all bonded together.

We gotta get the last out of the shoe.

This is called a de-lasting machine.

It kind of picks up the back, pull the shoe off.

Now the next thing that has to happen is the cupsole stitching operation, which goes all the way around the outsole of the shoe.

Inspection is complete.

We've removed all the blemishes from the manufacturing process.

Now it's time to put the lace and tissue paper, and put it in a box, and ship to a customer.

There was a lot of points in time that we weren't sure how far we could get, but I believed in what we were doing.

I believe in the team.

The team that we put together is a team of experts in their craft.

They focus on the technology aspects of their craft, and they expand on it.

Between Keith and Craig, both of them have a very large range of knowledge.

Craig has got a master's in textiles, and Keith, of course, has been doing knitting for quite some time, and has really owned the title of the, the head knitter.

KEITH STEPHAN-GIERMEK: My interest in sustainable fashion and manufacturing in the US started in 2006 in Toronto, Canada when I organized a sustainability fashion show at my college.

My job as a senior knit footwear manager involves programming the knitting machines, creating the knitting programs, knitting, and managing the production of our knits.

Also seeing those through the entire process through assembly.

I supervise our assembly folks in the sewing area, as well as keep those machines and these machines running.

I'm most proud of being able to work on manufacturing processes that work at a smaller scale but create a high output.

It feels pretty good to have come full circle and sort of seen that vision actually materialize.

I would tell somebody that's interested in manufacturing in the US to stay curious and continually master their craft.

ALLEN: Understanding how much we've built in the last four and a half years or so, I don't take it for granted.

And I will be honest, last year was probably the most hours I've ever worked in my entire career in one year.

I think it's a, it's a one-shot opportunity.

When you're a startup, you really need to believe that the future is tomorrow.

I have much bigger ambitions of where it's gonna go.

I'm still hungry.

I'm still hungry for more.

NARRATOR: In Maryland, decades of craftsmanship and innovation are woven into the manufacturing tradition at ECD Lacrosse, Savage River Works, and Made Plus.

Their work reminds us that great manufacturing isn't just about what gets made, it's about the people and ideas that make it possible.

JASON CHAPMAN: Spark goes in your brain, you have a graphic idea.

You take a picture of it, you send it to us, we're gonna get it in our template, we're gonna adjust it for sizing, then we're gonna send it to our printer.

We'll get the roll, pull it out, he'll cut each of the graphics out, get them lined up, and once we have the relief cuts, we're gonna put it through the machine, the heat transfer machine.

The way it works is the ink is printed on a piece of plastic, and once it's on the plastic, the heat transfer machine pushes it.

Not only does it use heat, but it actually pushes, so it's using pressure, too.

And then we're gonna take a razor, we're gonna cut the extra heat transfer paper that's left on it.

I know we look like cruddy skateboarders, and we're just like, "Ah," but it's like, in that room, it's very specific.

We do what we want, but we're also very, uh, meticulous about how much we care about making the perfect skateboard.

We really care about how, you know, beautiful it is.

I mean, it's... We love this.

This is a, a dream, a dream come true, to be able to make skateboards for people.

It really is amazing.

ANNOUNCER: Major funding for "Made in Maryland" is provided by... Offering big bank capabilities and boutique bank care, CFG Bank supports businesses of all sizes and industries, including manufacturing across Maryland.

We are CFG Bank.

Your success is our business.

This program is in part made possible through a partnership with Kaiser Permanente, which has been serving the Maryland community with high-quality healthcare for over 35 years.

The Maryland Marketing Partnership amplifies all that makes Maryland a great place to live, work, and do business in, including our bright minds, diverse population, and connectivity.

Learn more at business.maryland.gov.

Chesapeake Employers' Insurance, proud to support "Made in Maryland" and the exciting future for manufacturing in Maryland.

And by... ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪