“He was just brokering steel,” said Doug Lutz, one of his sons and the company’s president. “After about six month he rented a facility in New Miami.”
From there the company opened successive locations in Hamilton and one in Middletown before making “a bigger leap of faith” and building its current location at 1400 Made Drive in 1991, Lutz said.
The 100,000-square-foot facility provides close tolerance precision slit coil, pattern-sized sheets, precision blanks, technical laboratories and metallurgical support.
It sells to a variety of industries and markets including automotive, stampers, tubers, rollformers, fabricators, distributors and others. Various products made by those industries include caskets, furniture hardware and farm gates.
“We bring the large 45,000-pound (22.5 ton) coils in and cut them into smaller coils and sheets for our customers,” Lutz said. “The equipment we own shape corrects the material during the slitting process.”
“We can handle up to 60,000-pound coils (30 tons) … pretty much any size coil the mill can produce.”
Tomson Steel ships approximately 46,000 tons of steel a year, primarily to customers in more than 15 states throughout the Eastern United States and the Midwest.
“The footprint has become more concentrated over the years with steel mills being built in the south,” Lutz said. “There’s a mill called ThyssenKrupp TK that is in south Alabama. That just happened over the last two-and-a-half years whereas when my father started the business a lot of the products he sold was going all the way down to Alabama.
“Today, 80 percent of our business is within a 200- to 250-mile radius.”
The company purchases steel mainly from AK Steel, but also from Arcelor Mittal, Steel Dynamics Inc. and Nucor Corporation, Lutz said.
Tomson Steel currently has 28 employees. With “plenty of warehouse space” and a recently purchased second slitter, the company is poised to increase its business, Lutz said.
“The economy is going to turn around eventually … and the population is growing, so the market is going to grow over time,” he said.
The company’s financial situation is vastly improved compared to where it was four years ago, Lutz said.
“Things are much better, although the last two-and-a-half to three months have been a challenge, but I see things starting to turn around,’ he said. “I think the price of steel has eroded to a point where people are willing to make bigger buys. That’s what happened in the last two or three weeks. People have made commitments.”
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