Syracuse Glass Celebrates 100 Years

Today Syracuse Glass in Syracuse, N.Y., is celebrating 100 years in the glass industry.

“We’re having a dinner event for about 250 of our top customers as well as our staff,” shares John Dwyer, president of Syracuse Glass, of today’s celebration. Guests will be able to look over historical photographs from the company during a cocktail reception, before a presentation recognizing employees and long-term customers.

“We’re also going to celebrate that my parents, Jim and Kathleen Dwyer, have owned the business for 30 years,” Dwyer adds. “They bought it in 1979. So that’s another occasion to celebrate.” The company has changed significantly over the course of its 100-year history.

“The company was founded as a flat glass distributor and a contract glazier and they evolved into auto glass in the late ’40s,” Dwyer explains. “Over the years we’ve gotten more and more involved with glass fabrication, with insulating and tempering and such, and we started working with Tubelite about 30 years ago, making custom entrances. At this point it’s evolved to a regional fabricator and distributor. We’ve been out of the contract glazing for about 40 years I think now, and we sold off our auto glass distribution business to Pilkington about 3 years ago.” Such a longstanding company history is rare in any industry. Dwyer says a willingness to change has helped the company reach this mark.

“Take a hard look at the business periodically and see what’s performing and what isn’t,” Dwyer advises. As an example, he says, “Our auto glass distribution business was maybe 50 percent of our business 15 years ago and it was a difficult decision to get rid of that, but we looked out and said that maybe for the future it wasn’t a great business for us and redirect it to some other activities.” The company has change in its future as well, although Dwyer shared only one example of the company’s plans for the future.

“There’s a couple things we’re looking at, but given the economy we’re sort of just working on operational excellence, really tuning our processes,” he says. “We’re installing FeneVision software that we’re going to start running parallel on in December, and we’re going to offer early next year online order entry and order inquiry to the customers by using this new FeneVision software which we don’t currently offer. That’s our kind of our big project for the near term.”