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Up until a warm day in June of 2013, Micro Metal Finishing owner John Rose’s company was plating thousands of washing machine parts a week for a major appliance manufacturer, just up the highway from his Cincinnati plant.
Then the phone call came, and things changed drastically for his business.
“Just like that,” says Rose. “They called and said they were changing their processes, and they didn’t need to nickel chrome plate that part anymore.”
It’s a phone call hundreds of plating shops across the U.S. get every day—lost business, through no fault of their own.
Micro Metal had an entire plating line dedicated to the washer machine parts, and the next day things started winding down. But you won’t hear Rose complain about his customer.
“We benefitted for several years when they moved that plating work down from Michigan to us,” he says. “It happens sometimes. There are no hard feelings because they were a good customer to us. But it didn’t hide the fact that I had a plating line that stopped that quickly.”