The president of Canadian manufacturer Wilcox GSE tells Airside about his journey into the industry and why aluminium is the material of the future.
Your father bought Wilcox GSE in 1980 – when did you first join the company?
[My father] is retired now, so I run the company. I was working there part-time when I was about 13, and I came on full-time after I finished university. I have been here for 28 years now – we are still family owned and operated.
Wilcox GSE was originally solely a truck body manufacturer. How did the company’s journey into GSE production begin?
The truck side is Wilcox Bodies, which still exists. It started in 1962, and then my dad bought it in 1980. My personality is trying to diversify and see what other things we can do. One area that we didn’t have was anything in aviation. It was about nine years ago now, pre-COVID, when I started looking at opportunities on the aviation side.
So, I reached out to customers we were already doing work for in the aviation industry. That’s really where it started. We do a bunch of baggage carts and dollies, and our product line keeps expanding.
I wanted to get into aviation for the recession-proof side of it. Then, obviously, COVID hit and killed the industry for a while. Once we got on the other side of that, it gave us another opportunity to introduce more products and diversify.
You have said that one of the factors that differentiates Wilcox GSE from competitors is your customer-centric approach. Can you give some examples of this?
Pretty much everything that we do starts with feedback. It’s a little bit challenging because every customer has a different need. Something that works for one customer, somebody else doesn’t care about, and vice versa. So, we try to get as much information as we can.
Just over a year ago, we created a GSE advisory board that includes 10 people from the industry, just to give us feedback on what the industry is doing, what the trends are, and what they want us to see. That helps us change and develop our products.
Recently, we’ve introduced a new cargo dolly. We had one out there, and we were getting feedback that it wasn’t really strong enough. We were using a tubular design, but due to weight savings the walls of the material weren’t thick enough, so users were seeing denting. We completely redesigned everything, introduced a brand-new model, and put it out to customers for testing – it’s been fantastic.
As a manufacturer designing products, if you go in close-minded or with blinders on, you’re never going to improve. Positive feedback is great, but negative feedback actually helps us improve and keep building.
That’s really my drive with our team: listen to our customers. We can have our own opinions, but they’re the users, so let’s see what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, and let’s change what we do to meet their needs.
Can you tell me about the advantages of using aluminium?
We’ve been manufacturing with aluminium in our truck division for about 45 years, so we have a lot of experience with it. One of the challenges we have is that some people think aluminium is not as strong as steel, when it absolutely is. In certain circumstances, depending on how you design it, it can actually be stronger.
It’s lighter weight, meaning that it is better for electric vehicles, and the environmental impact is much less significant – all the aluminium we use is previously recycled. Visually, you’re not going to get a cart that rusts and looks bad after a few years of scratching. Near oceans or islands, where there’s a high salt concentration, aluminium doesn’t rust and dissolve like steel does.
The biggest challenge we have is cost. Aluminium is more expensive, and it’s harder to compete at larger volumes. We’re working on different ways to bring the cost down by changing our design manufacturing processes. I truly feel it’s the product of the future.
What kind of trends have you been seeing in the GSE world recently, and how is Wilcox GSE responding to them?
Safety is more and more at the forefront of everything that we do, alongside building products that last longer, and trying to keep pricing as low as possible. Even when we talk about tugs and bobtails, there are a lot of questions around electrification.
That’s always in the back of our minds – how do we advance our products and bring [electrification] into our world.
How has your outsider perspective shaped your experience in the GSE industry?
It gives me the ability to look at things a little bit differently. I’m not fixated on the idea that the industry has to run a certain way. I tend to ask, why can’t you do it this way instead?
As an example, we have customers that will ask for caster covers to protect the wheels of cargo dollies. I just don’t really understand why they use it, and nobody seems to be able to answer.
In this industry, if we are all just copying everyone else’s equipment, it’s going to be the same forever. Asking questions gives us the ability to change things. We changed how we design our dollies, putting caster covers in certain areas and leaving them uncovered where there’s no risk of damage. That saves weight and saves customers money. So far, no one using the new product has come back and said it needs to be done the old way. I’ve actually seen that some of our competitors are doing the same as us.
I love doing things differently and trying to think outside the box. Being a little bit more raw to the industry allows me to [do this], and I think that’s an advantage for us.
