Every customizable Gatorade bottle made in West Knoxville
Technical Response has grown to 300 employees, up from 80 at the end of 2020, and its secret sauce is the custom automation equipment it designs and manufacturers for itself.
It had been more than three years since we last checked-in with the top leadership at a Hardin Valley global manufacturing company that has changed its name in the ensuing period. What we not only learned in terms of its new name was also how the production of its core product has changed, thanks to customization equipment that the company has developed.
Originally known as Innovate Manufacturing Inc., the company’s new name is Technical Response Inc. Scott Huff, the West Point graduate who founded Innovate International Group in 2004 and Innovate Manufacturing 11 years later, said he needed to consolidate four companies under a single brand.
“I had a friend who had a company named Tactical Response, so I modified that for our name,” Huff said. And, as we learned during our updated tour of the facility, technology has played a critical role in the rapid growth of the business.
When we last visited the company in late 2020, there was a good deal of construction underway as the business was in the midst of nearly tripling the size of the building it first occupied in 2015. Fortunately, the company had planned ahead and ordered the steel needed for the expansion, since acquiring it became a real challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today, John Lin, Vice President of Global Operations, says the company has grown to 300 employees, up from 80 at the end of 2020 when we published this teknovation.biz article in early 2021.
“We’re growing really, really fast,” he says, adding, “We were in the right spot at the right time.”
What is driving the growth? It is customization, primarily of bottles for its largest client – Gatorade, a division of PepsiCo.
“There are lots of custom bottles we make every day,” Huff says. “Customization is a trend.”
And, lest you think that customization means mass-producing the same design, that is not the case.
“The order is typically a few bottles per customer,” Lin says.
From its Hardin Valley facility off Goldenfern Lane, we watched an elaborate assembly line of equipment produce customized and personalized bottles that can display a person’s name, company and sports team logo, favorite color, and a lot more. Starting at this point, step 1 is to pick one of 32 accent colors, then one of 32 base colors followed by one of 11 preferred patterns. After selecting a quantity that can be one to 60, the final two steps are to select one of four bottle back options – a word, team or company logo, one of 30 standard team mascots, or blank – and the wording on the lid.
As the sole provider of the Gatorade bottles, Technical Response’s secret sauce is its ability to design, engineer, and manufacture its own custom automation equipment and have the machinery operational within a week.
Lin joined the Innovate International Group four years after its founding and relocated from China to the U.S. in 2014. At the time, he and Huff were the only engineers on the staff. Today, there are about a dozen.
Although Technical Response had been supplying bottles to Gatorade for years, the customization option was only launched in December 2023. Since then, Lin says it has exploded with the volume increasing by 5X in just months.
“Customization could be 50 percent of the business within a year,” he says.
Technical Response’s expansion in 2021 maxed out the property that it owns in Hardin Valley, so we asked Lin what the growth plans are.
“Automation and a new manufacturing system we just implemented will allow us to grow our capacity by another 40 percent,” he says, adding that the company is beginning to explore how artificial intelligence might also be used.
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