___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
table with attached stools and benches. To get his new venture off the ground, he sold his half of WACO and founded SICO in 1951, just in time for that first wave of baby boomers reaching school age. In the early days, no one fully understood the concept, as nobody had ever seen a mobile folding cafeteria table with stools or benches before, and it took time and persistence at trade shows to finally develop interest. Kermit applied the same mobile folding philosophy across all the products he designed, such as ping pong tables, beds, ironing boards and more. By the 1960s, he had turned his attention to portable staging and dance floor panels, always driven by the same idea of helping people transform and maximize their spaces, making one room serve many purposes.”
Sometime in the mid-1960s, Kermit began expanding the business globally through a licensing model. The very first license went to a Japanese company with a division
dedicated to supplying cafeteria tables to schools. The second licensee was in England, where three people named Arthur Grunwald, John Merricks, and David Ford, formed SICO Europe. They started in London, moved to Kent and Ashford as the business grew, and eventually purchased land and built a facility at Lympne Industrial Park. Over time, SICO established licensees across many countries, some of which were successful while others failed, but this was all part of the process. Today, the company has moved to full ownership across its international operations, with offices in Australia, Singapore and Japan, a factory and office in England, and sales offices in Madrid and Dubai. In the US, SICO’ s manufacturing operations are based in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The Wisconsin facility brings in laminate and medium density fiber core board, shapes components on CNC routers, armor-edges them, then packs and sends them to Minneapolis for final assembly.
122