Owens Corning’s pink started as a test dye that installers wouldn’t give up
The Toledo maker of insulation and roofing grew from a glass-block experiment that went somewhere unexpected, and its best-known color came from what installers asked for.
Toledo, OH
At the Owens Corning plant in Newark, Ohio, the people testing a new insulation needed a way to tell it apart from the white insulation already on the market. The new product was a fiberglass wool the company called All Fiber, or AF. The testers added red dye to it, and the red turned the wool pink.
The pink wool did well with installers. When the company brought AF insulation to market, though, it left the dye out. Installers didn’t like that and asked for the pink, and pink is what they got. In 1987 Owens Corning became the first company to trademark a single color.
The episode fits a pattern. Owens Corning itself came out of an experiment that went somewhere nobody planned, and some of its best-known choices were settled far from headquarters, by the people who handled what it made. For more than 70 years it also ran a California plant where workers got their children hired. Then it shut that plant down.
Owens Corning is a public company, traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker OC. It makes insulation, roofing and glass-fiber composites, and it is based in Toledo, where it was formed.
The start was a glass block. An experiment with glass building blocks produced an unexpected result, Roofing Contractor reported in 2013: it revealed a way to make glass fibers in commercial quantities. On Oct. 31, 1938, the Owens-Illinois Glass Company of Toledo and Corning Glass Works of Corning, New York, incorporated a joint venture, Owens-Corning Fiberglas, to make fiberglass insulation and furnace filters.
In the early 1950s, a U.S. antitrust decree required the two parents to sell part of their stakes, and the company later listed its stock on an exchange. It grew well beyond Ohio. In 1994 it bought Pilkington Insulation in Britain.
It went west early. In 1949 Owens Corning opened a plant in Santa Clara, California, on land that was then mostly farms. The U.S. Department of Energy called it the “first industrial plant in the United States designed specifically to manufacture insulation,” the Silicon Valley Voice reported in 2022.
The Santa Clara plant ran long enough for jobs there to pass from parents to children. After the Silicon Valley Voice reported that it was closing, former workers and their families left comments under the story. Readers wrote about fathers who had worked there 26, 32, 35, 42 and 47 years. One man wrote that his father, a security guard at the plant, got him a job there in 1973, and that he worked his way from packer to furnace operator before retiring in 2015 with 42 years. Another wrote that his father started at 18, stayed 47 years, and went by the nickname Cowboy for the hat and boots he wore when he first started.
Inside its plants, the company spent years working on one number. By 2013 its recordable injury rate had fallen every year for 11 years, and the count of injuries had dropped from more than 1,000 a year to fewer than 100. The stated goal was zero injuries across its nearly 100 facilities worldwide. The National Safety Council named Owens Corning the 2014 recipient of its Green Cross for Safety Medal.
“We must get our employees home in the same safe and healthy condition in which they arrive at work,” Mike Thaman, then chairman and CEO, said in remarks published by Roofing Contractor in 2013. The company was marking 75 years, a milestone the magazine noted only a few hundred U.S.-based companies had reached.
Getting insulation to a job site runs on a tight clock. In 2020, when the company had 19,000 employees and operations in 33 countries, Pat Cassity, a supply chain director at Owens Corning, described the delivery side in FreightWaves. Distributors often have narrow delivery windows, he explained, because an installation crew is waiting to unload the truck, load its own and drive to the job site. That makes the company’s insulation logistics far more “just in time” than many people realize, FreightWaves reported.
“The trucking industry is very fluid and we utilize in the neighborhood of 100 dry van carriers to deliver products for our insulation and composites businesses,” Cassity said in the 2020 FreightWaves article. Because those carriers deliver straight to customers, he said, the company considers them part of its own customer experience. “Having carriers we can depend on to deliver product undamaged, on time, and as promised, and being able to communicate that information to us and to our customers is of paramount importance,” he told the publication.
The company also pushed further into roofing components. In 2016 Owens Corning agreed to buy InterWrap, a maker of synthetic roofing underlayment and packaging materials, for $450 million. InterWrap ran facilities in the United States, Canada, India and China and made underlayment under the Titanium and RhinoRoof names. Brian Chambers, then president of Owens Corning’s roofing and asphalt business, said in the company’s announcement that the deal would strengthen its ability to keep driving the conversion from organic to synthetic underlayments. By 2020 Chambers was the company’s chairman and CEO.
Owens Corning also courts the contractors who put its shingles on houses. At its 2024 Platinum Conference in San Diego, it honored roofing contractors for business growth, safety culture and environmental stewardship, among other things, RoofersCoffeeShop reported.
The Santa Clara plant was scheduled to close in 2022, with about 225 employees expected to lose their jobs, the Silicon Valley Voice reported. The company had no other Bay Area facility to move them to. “We greatly appreciate our Santa Clara employees and provided over a year of notice ahead of closure so employees could make the best decisions for themselves and their families,” an Owens Corning spokesperson told The Weekly, the paper’s print edition. To make up the lost production, the company resumed fiberglass insulation production at its plant in Eloy, Arizona, and began expanding its fiberglass plant in Nephi, Utah.
Owens Corning had already disclosed in a filing that it would sell the site to Panattoni Development, with the sale to be completed once the plant closed. A notice posted outside 960 Central Expressway laid out one plan for the land where the country’s first purpose-built insulation plant had operated since 1949: demolish the existing buildings and put up three new ones, up to 890,000 square feet in all, for warehousing or data centers.