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Braun Brush – An Interview With The CEO of a 140 Year Old Company, Lance Cheney

Current Braun Brush CEO and successful sculptor, Lance Cheney, says his company has thrived for 140 years because every generation has brought their own spin to the company. His great-grandfather brought the art of brush making from Germany to America. His grandfather brought an entrepreneurial spirit that built the business during the vulnerable start-up years at the turn of the 20th century. His dad used marketing and management skills to shape the company in the industrial era. Then by marrying his fine arts background and artistic skill with business acumen and innovation, Lance Cheney has put the ultimate spin on Braun Brush, making it one of the most diverse brush making companies in the U.S.

Dr. Beasley’s and Simon’s Shine Shop owner Jim Lafeber recently chatted with Lance about brush-making, art, and running a successful business in the 21st century.

Jim Lafeber:     1875. I don’t know many companies that have been around 139 years. Give us some history on Braun Brush.

Lance Cheney:     First, I want to say thank you for this opportunity, and we really appreciate the work the IDA does for your industry and mine.

My great-grandfather came to this country alone from a small town outside Heidelberg, Germany in 1865. He was 15 years old, looking to make his mark in life. He had been a brush maker’s apprentice, but worked odd jobs when he first arrived in this country.

Envision New York in 1865. The Brooklyn Bridge wasn’t built; the Civil War was ending; and Custer was making his Last Stand. Dairy products were delivered in glass milk bottles by horse-drawn cart every day, to people’s doorstep. Thousands of those milk bottles were picked up and brought back to the dairies to be cleaned by hand with a brush.

That’s where my great-grandfather made his mark. While New York City grew up around him, he started making bottle wash brushes in the basement of his home.  

JL:     Stats show that many family businesses fall apart in the second or third generation. How did yours survive?

LC:     Well, it almost did. My great grandfather married, had a family, and the business grew with three of his sons involved in the company. Unfortunately, when he passed away, the sons broke off into three competing brush companies.

My maternal grandfather had been the plant manager, so he really understood the brush-making process and the best materials to use. When his older brother left the company, taking all of the accounts and employees, my grandfather went out and rebuilt the company. He did everything from sales to developing his own brush products to make Braun Brush what it is today.

During the early 1950s, he was the first person to use DuPont’s popular new synthetic product known as nylon, which replaced the fiber horsehair and whalebone brushes that had been used for years.

Now, my dad got involved because he married the boss’ only daughter!

He was a mechanical-minded businessman with a forte for marketing. He identified the dairy, baking, and food-processing industries as our three main marketing segments and during the early 1960s, created a success direct mail campaign targeting all three.

Now the neat thing about that, the irony if you will, is that those three niche markets make up only half of the brushes we make today! The other 50 percent are custom brushes and brushes we make for other brush makers who don’t want to turn away business, but don’t want to do the special order stuff either.

We have always been a sort of problem-solving company where an industry has a specific need for a certain type of brush, and we custom-make them. It has allowed us to make brushes for a wide range of uses from brushes for offshore oilrigs to the auto appearance industry, and even the Mars Rover.

Braun Brush

JL:     Making the decision to work in your father’s company is a step many don’t want to take. How did you make that decision?

LC:     There were a couple of things. I grew up in the company, started working there during the summer in my early teens, and if I ever needed money, it was a way for me to earn it. Dad never said this is your destiny or demanded this be what I do. He always left the company door open, but gave me time and space to explore my own path.

I studied fine arts and finance in college.  After I got my degree I pretty much goofed off, surfing in the summer and teaching skiing in the winter.  I did not really think about working with my Dad, although I knew at some point I would.

He was smart. One day he said to me, “I’m thinking of retiring and if you’re interested in the brush business, you should come onboard now. Otherwise, I’m going to sell the company.”

I said all right and started working for him fulltime, even though he continued to work another 25 years! He never had any intention of retiring! He was making me fish, or cut bait!

He definitely gave me enough latitude to fly my own direction with the company, and that made it fun. I was also fortunate to be able to work with my dad for 25 years before he passed away.  

JL:     One of the things I know about you is that you are not an “ivory tower” kind of guy. You are actively involved in the business; you go out onto the production room floor and get your hands dirty.

LC:     I wish I could spend more time out there because I enjoy being a part of the process and I get excited about the innovation. Our employees are craftsmen and women who are constantly evolving the brush-making process and figuring out new ways to do it. That’s where the fun is.  

JL:     You have higher value behind the desk, yet you want to be on the floor. I find myself in the same place. I like to be on the floor, to make chemicals and watch the innovation evolve, but the business end, the office, pulls me away. How do you balance those things?

LC:     I am a great believer in making lists and prioritizing. I have things that have to be done, and I have things I just want to do. I set aside specific days to get done what has to be done in the office; but I reward myself for getting those things done by giving myself time to play out in the shop.  

JL:     So getting into your brushes. When you look at a brush-making project or developing a new or custom brush, what type of analysis do you do in deciding what fibers that brush will need; and how do you determine the strength of the bristle.

LC:     That’s a great question. I think knowing the desired outcome of the brush is number one. Will it be used to apply something, or to remove something?

The stiffness of the fiber, known as the bristle, determines how full the brush needs to be. Will it be used wet, dry, or both? Will the brush be exposed to any chemical processes? There is more to it than that, but I start there.  

JL:     Tell me about bristle memory.

LC:     Memory is the ability of a fiber to come back to its original shape. It is a function of the quality of the fiber and the type of plastic used. Lesser expensive fibers don’t have memory ― everybody has seen brushes whose bristles are squashed down and splayed after only a little use. You will know a good quality nylon or polyester fiber by its excellent memory and ability to come back to its original shape.

  JL:     I recently bought a handsome-looking natural horsehair brush but once we immersed it in water to wash a car, it felt dead. I understand now, that it didn’t have any memory. Maybe horsehair is more suitable as a dusting brush. Some carwash applications use a hard bristle.

LC:     Actually, bristles like boar’s hair, naturally taper down to a very, very fine point on the ends, and sometimes they even split on the ends, so the ends that actually touch the car are very soft and delicate. The end where it comes out of the animal is quite thick and gives the brush body.

Horsehair is just the opposite. The hair usually comes from the tail and is the same diameter all the way down the tail. It may feel soft, but it’s actually quite floppy and doesn’t have the softness at the tip, nor the body at the base.  

JL:     I started my detailing shop and carwash in Chicago ten years ago and everyone was trying to sell me a brush. I was in the market for a good wheel brush because I wanted to do a good job cleaning the wheels. Everyone else seemed to be using a brush with a metal twisting wire in the center.

I told my guys, “I’m not going to use that on a wheel.” Like you, I’m always trying to find answers and solutions to problems everyone in the industry faces. I think the perception is bad having metal in there, but when I first ran across your company’s proprietary Wheel Woolies, it was a “Wow” moment.

I said, “This is it! That’s what I need, and it has a plastic stem.”

LC:     I felt the same way. For years, that was all that was on the market. There wasn’t a better mousetrap.

The Wheel Woolies came about when we first saw people using microfiber to clean expensive flutes and brass musical instruments. I thought, ‘right material, wrong stiffness’ because it was so soft.

If we could make that brush on a stiffer core and still get the bristles over on the end, it would be a heck of a wheel cleaning brush.

We built a prototype, tested it, and were very satisfied with the result. We launched Wheel Woolies in 2007.

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JL:     Sometimes I worry about the durability of the brush using microfiber materials because they are so soft, but we do hundreds of cars and they last a long time. Is the material you use a specialized, more durable microfiber, or something on the broad circuit?

LC:     Traditional microfiber is a little bit of a misnomer. It means fiber that is tiny, but it is usually polypropylene or synthetic wool.

Polypropylene doesn’t make a great brush fiber because it doesn’t have a lot of memory to bring it back to its usual shape, or at least not as good as some of the other nylons, or boar’s hair; but, when it’s densely packed, the fibers support themselves because there is so much of it. It a) holds the suds from the bucket to the wheel, and b) does a complete job when wiping. It’s not going to leave any streaks, and because it is so densely packed.  

JL:     It can sit in a bucket of water all day long and still hold up.

LC:     Yes, polypro is inert to most acids and strong chemicals and is a stable plastic.  

JL:     When I detail a car, I look at all the different surfaces to figure out what is the best bristle, or the best brush for a particular service. The one thing we don’t want to do as detailers is cause any damage, do no harm. We want to clean the car and bring it to a better place than it was before.

If I am going to do the interior, let’s say clean the carpet, should I look for a certain bristle when cleaning the carpet, or the upholstery?

LC:     Certainly, there are different brushes for every area and every surface in the vehicle. Most carpet cleaning brushes are actually spotting brushes. They aren’t intended for scrubbing a carpet because all you are doing is fraying one carpet fiber against another. With a carpet cleaning brush or a spotting brush, your chemical works with the brush to agitate and loosen the dirt from the fiber.

Many times, once the chemical is on the fabric, all you have to do is place a clean cloth over the spot and use the spotting brush to tap the cloth into the fibers. This transfers the spot from the carpet onto the cloth.  

JL:     So, for the stain, just put a little cloth on top of it, agitate it a little bit with the bristles, but don’t scrub, and then let the cloth soak it up.

LC:     The debris in the stain has to go somewhere. In some cases, it is vacuumed out, but you aren’t going to scrub away the stain with a brush. A brush is going to penetrate the stain and break it down, but it will need to be removed with another cloth. In fact, as you know, scrubbing may actually spread the spot around.  

JL:     That’s a good tip.

LC:     We’ve been making car wash brushes for many years, but the Wheel Woolies certainly brought us to the forefront of the automotive industry and it’s been a lot of fun meeting all these detailers.

Our commitment from the start is not to see how many brushes we can throw at the detailers. Our responsibility is to find out what we can do that is an improvement over what you already have. How can we use our 140 years of brush-making experience to improve the brushes detailers use today. What other products can we get into the marketplace to improve techniques and do the work better or cheaper? It’s been fun introducing our brush products to potential users and seeing how we can continuously improve on them.  

JL:     You mentioned liking Wheel Woolies for getting in there and deep cleaning but, what about paint finish?

LC:     There are so many schools of thought on that and I hesitate to say one way is better than another is. You guys are certainly experts on paint finish and how to protect it, but dirt is what scratches the paint.

Many people are worried about using a brush for fear it will scratch the paint, but really, there is nothing on a fine boar’s hair brush that would scratch the finish but dirt. If dirt moves across the finish, we have to be very careful.  

JL:     We use microfiber towels, constantly changing them out, and a wash mitt; but you must keep the water and suds clean, and get the dirt away from the finish whether you use a foam mitt or a brush.

I see you talking about different brushes on your video and you’re right, the dirt scratches it; but if you have a car that has heavy dirt and you use a mitt to get most of it off, you may scratch the car doing it. The perception from the public is that if you use a brush on a car, you’re going to scratch it. They don’t think about the different types of fiber bristles, but they get very upset when they see us use a brush on a car.

I try to tell them it will cause less problems than a mitt. The soap and the surfactants are trying to pull the dirt away … is that right, that a very good, soft brush is safer on a car than a wash mitt?

LC:     Well you’re asking a brush maker, so what else can I say, absolutely, and here’s why I think a brush will work with that Jim.

You have to think, “Where did the dirt go?”

You loosen the dirt with water and some type of soap, but now, the dirt has to be lifted. Where is the dirt going to go? If you’re using a cloth and you’re pushing the dirt around, there’s no place for that dirt to go within the weave of the cloth.

I recommend a boar’s hair brush because the tips are so fine that once the dirt is agitated, it gets well into the brush. If you have a nice long fiber brush, you could wick that dirt away. You certainly have to rinse the brush out thoroughly and frequently, having some place for the dirt to go rather than trapping it in a cloth or pushing it around the paint surface.

For us, as a U.S.-based manufacturer located in New York, the exciting thing for me is developing products your readers need. That’s is where the fun is for me.  

JL:     I think I hear a challenge coming?

LC:     I put it out there to your readers: If there is a brush you need or feel would help you in any way, let us know about it because that’s the brush we want to make.  

JL:     Tell me about some interesting uses and jobs. Start with those on the Freedom Tower. They are there to keep the pigeon’s from landing on it. Is that right?

LC:     The brushes act as a seal so the birds can’t get in. The tower’s walkways are rotating catwalks with moving parts. They needed a seal that wasn’t so tight as to affect the tolerance of the moving parts, but that would close off the wider gaps so birds couldn’t get in and settle in. That could be damaging and messy. Essentially, the superstructure moves through the brush, but then seals up ― not airtight, but certainly tight enough to keep birds from getting in.

Braun Brush, Mars Rover

JL:     How did you get the job making brushes for the Mars Rover?

LC:     We’ve received many interesting projects through the years but that one really elevated our own sense of pride in our brushes.

A Manhattan-based company called Honeybee Robotics approached us about needing a brush for a router that would keep a hole clean as it was being routed.

I said okay, we can do that. Then they said, “Oh, by the way, it has to be able to withstand extremely variable temperatures between minus-250 degrees to 250 degrees plus; and it can’t weigh more than 2.7834 grams, or some such number.”

I said, “That sounds like a space application,” and he said, “I can’t comment on that.”

Later, when they called back for another project, I asked how the first brushes worked out. They said, “Great! They’re up there now.”

I said, “Up where?”

They said, “You don’t know? Let me send you some images.”

They sent me pictures of the Rover on Mars with our brushes. You could see the brushes too, in the reflection of the Martian surface in the background.

The customer turned out to be a subcontractor for NASA, and they were developing the robotic arm that was on the Rover. We made a dozen of these small tufts of stainless steel fibers welded together like a brush. It was just what they needed for the application.  

JL:     How does it work?

LC:     I guess there are very, very high winds on the surface of Mars, and the wind brings dust and sand from one area to another.

The Rover was searching for water, so they would grind the rock to get rid of any re-deposited soil from another area. They bored into the bedrock by drilling small holes about two inches in diameter by an eighth of an inch deep into the rock, so they could do a spectral analysis. After figuring out what those elements were, they can determine whether moisture has ever been present.

Our brushes swept away the top debris, and as they were grinding holes, the brushes keep pushing the grinding debris away from the hole to keep it clean so they could do the spectral analysis.  

JL:     And so who is running Braun Brush after you? Are any of your kids involved?

LC:     I have two sons and a daughter. Both boys worked here this summer. When they want money, I tell them I know where they can earn some. I plan to follow my father’s example not to push that on them, but if it’s something they can get passionate about and they find a future here, it’s certainly available to them.

Braun Brush

JL:     Thank you for taking the time! This has been great.

LC:     Thank you! I appreciate it.

2 thoughts on “Braun Brush – An Interview With The CEO of a 140 Year Old Company, Lance Cheney

  1. Ron says:

    Loved this interview. Thank you.

    My name is Ron Moody. I’m a 76 yo guy who grew up in Riverhead NY, out on Long Island.
    Without getting too far into the “weeds” here, let me say that my grandfather on my mother’s side was William Braun who I visited as an approx. 7 or 8yo boy as he was dying in his hone in Flatbush. My mother was officially named Josephine Alice Braun by birth, but went by Alyce during her life. She was the youngest of the four daughters of William who I was told came to America as a late teenager from Gernany in approx 1891.
    The oldest daughter was named Mildred and she oversaw the business when her father passed.
    If anyone is interested, I can be reached by email at moodyron1946@gmail.com
    Text me, or any other way of communication is also fine.
    Thank you for reading this.
    Ron

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