Your Customer Comes First

Today's consumer looks very different from consumers 10 years ago. Whether you are selling to Health Professionals, Business Managers with a Mobile Work Force, Plant Floor Managers, or 10 year old kids, they expect products to feel right, look right, work right and instantly respond to their needs.

Consumers expect products to work properly, fit nicely in their hand, have decoration that is appropriate and contemporary, and provide durability and weight functionality that exceeds previous experience. All of these are more achievable today for companies who use innovation to stay ahead.

Many of the processes, materials and technologies that our industry was built on, were developed before these new age customer requirements were pervasive. At Cashmere, we have stayed ahead of the technology curve, and in tune with updates in materials and processes. In fact, on many fronts we are leading the northwest into the future. Always, we are doing it to ensure that your customers' experience is improved - either by enabling a lower price or an improved comfort and functionality.

The Right Design

The ideal design for any part or product requires a mix of focus on customer usability, function, material choice, and optimizing for molds and production efficiency. All the decisions come together in design.

Cashmere's skilled, degreed, design engineers are educated to help you make these decisions, and have years of practical experience working with the realities of plastics. We ensure your design is optimized for modern manufacturing techniques, modern consumers, and your budget and timing needs.

Let us help you design the products and parts that will truly give you the advantage in the market.

The Right Materials for the Job

Plastics and adjacent materials are advancing at an alarming and incredibly exciting rate. New techniques for classic materials and brand new materials are being invented daily, improving your options. Staying ahead of the technology curve requires an understanding of the projected values, the trade-offs and costs, and an educated perspective on how these will impact your products and their functionality.

Plastics are not all the same, and more importantly, the processes used to manufacture with them are not all the same. Ensuring that your product gives you an advantage in the market requires an understanding of your options. We work with you to think through your customer requirements, functional and structural requirements and help guide you to the right materials for your design.

The Right Technology for the Task

A decade ago China started winning business away from Northwest plastics companies. Initially they did it with cheap labor, but soon they began to focus on automation, robotics and other techniques that lower cost, increase efficiency, and provided higher levels of predictability and control.

We saw the trend and started investigating those technologies, techniques and processes. Today we have the robots they use to gain advantage, the processes they use to minimize waste and increase efficiency, and the processes and materials to ensure that we are competitive with China and other leaders in plastics manufacturing. We also have patented processes that we have invented that give us an advantage over them.

How can you be sure that your products and parts are leveraging the ideal technologies and processes? By incorporating those technologies into your development, design, and manufacturing process decisions. And To do that, you must first be working with an organization that has those capabilities.

Often times we find older technologies and techniques to be the most cost optimal solution - "good enough," if you will. In those cases, we work with you to understand the trade-offs and help you decide if you should use them. You are a part of that decision, and the savings to lower your cost base. Make sure it is optimization and not the lack of capabilities by your vendor that is driving your decision process.

On-shore Versus Off-shore

Global sourcing has become a way of life for most product developers. Cost pressure and capabilities have made that a reality.

With global sourcing there are obvious human challenges of dealing with people across the planet, in different time zones, cultures, and different languages. But there are logistics challenges as well. Prototyping is hard enough, when trying to better your product and get a practical read on how well your designs will work. Add shipping from China to that process, translation issues and nomenclature challenges, and doing all this remotely.

Now imagine, having all the advantages of your off-shore provider, coming from a vendor who knows the market you are building for, can sit across the table from you during prototyping, can make changes to a part rapidly and get those changes to you the next day. What are you really saving by working across the ocean?

Now apply that to the day to day operations of your business. For example: for some reason the color blue is starting to sell in 3 of your largest markets. How fast can you load your supply chain with blue when it takes 2 - 4 weeks for the products to arrive via trans-oceanic shipping? Not to mention manufacturing lead-time and clearing customs.

The Right Process for Cost, Quality and Timing

Quality and innovation are not always merely materials and technologies. Over the past two decades we have found that process can have more of an impact on cost, quality and timing than almost any other single variable.

Cashmere has a state-of-the-art facility driven by state-of-the-art processes, and run by life-long employees that care about what we build, how we build it, and your satisfaction.

We run the plant 24 hours a day, with a highly regimented quality and inspection process. Each station has been optimized by process engineers to eliminate waste, time and failure, and is the product of depth and maturity that only happens when people care.

Quality as a Platform

Quality is our culture and encapsulates everything we do. Regardless of how you measure quality, we have the bases covered.

Our work with Medical instruments, Aerospace, and Manufacturing require verifiable quality and mature quality processes and controls. These processes and controls are incorporated into everything we do, and are foundational to everything we produce.

You have heard about materials, technologies and processes. Quality is a governing force across those variables, and a large part of what we measure and manage to at Cashmere.

Lifetime Employee Approach

We provide careers for smart energetic people with values that align with ours. Our drug free, highly efficient, state of the art work environment, is the pride of our company, and the real differentiator for Cashmere as a company and as a partner.

We stand behind every part and every product we build for you. We can only do that if our employees stand behind their work.

We have achieved our ISO 9001:2008 accreditation, as well as our ISO 13485 accreditation. These verify our processes and our approach. But it is our employees and management that make quality a culture at Cashmere.

This philosophy has been driven from the top down for two decades, and is the foundation for our future.