What ladies lingerie taught Stanisław Ozga about off-highway equipment.

The early 1990s were a difficult period in Poland, which had just begun its transition to capitalism. In 1990, Stanisław Ozga graduated university with a degree as a mining engineer. “After spending a full month one-thousand meters underground on a student internship, I wasn’t keen to continue in mining,” he laughs.

Realizing that a career in sales and marketing would keep him working above ground, he did some additional coursework, sent out CVs, and found a job selling vegetable oils. Then he sold insurance, worked a gastarbeiter in Norway on a salmon farm, and even ran his own trade company for several years.

In 1994, he stumbled upon Zakłady Dziewiarskie Mewa SA, a textile factory that manufactured ladies lingerie. The company was formed in the 1960s but had suffered after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite being the largest underwear factory in Poland with 800 workers, it had no sales. Ozga was invited to head the sales, marketing, and export operations.

‘Process is critical’

Ozga traveled to southern Europe, since he knew this region was home to the world’s top lingerie brands. He persuaded the Italians to allow Mewa to produce for them. He also focused on the home market, employing designers to create collections for the Polish market. 

After a meeting in France, the Playtex company asked him to create a production line for their bras. But the factory employees — and even his boss — were very skeptical. “The Playtex bra design was much more complex,” he says. “To the workers it was like being asked manufacture a Mercedes when you’ve only ever made Dacias.” The technological process was also much more sophisticated, with operations calculated in seconds. But Ozga understood bra manufacturing as very similar to making mining frames. “The principles are the same. The process is critical. If you have the right tools, and if you organize yourselves in the right way, then it can be done well.” Ozga did it well.

Ozga stayed with Mewa for the next ten years, growing its export to Western Europe, Russia, and even to Saudia Arabia. Today it is a successful publicly traded company.

The recipe for safety

In 2004, Ozga joined Fortaco in Janów Lubelski. In 2008, he says, the Janów Lubelski factory found itself in a similar situation to the company he had just left. “All our eggs were in one basket, because were almost entirely serving only one market, the construction industry.” When the global financial crisis brought the construction business to its knees, the factory lost half its orders overnight. Military orders, a smaller part of its business, also shrunk dramatically.

“My job,” says Ozga, “was to essentially fix the same problem: to diversify our portfolio to reduce risk. This is the recipe for safety.” As a rule of thumb, Ozga says no single customer should constitute more than 30 percent of the Janów Lubelski factory output. Currently, material handling is the largest sector the factory serves, but it has multiple customers within the sector. Mining is 25 percent of the portfolio, with the balance made up of the construction, agriculture, energy, and military sectors.

“What we’re working on now is to balance the share within each industry. We don’t need to serve more industry segments, but rather grow along with the customers we have. They are the world leaders in their businesses, and our objective is to help them grow.”

Turnkey production

Poland today is not the Poland of the 1990s. Its GDP ranks tenth among the 48 sovereign states of Europe, and it’s no longer a low-cost country for manufacturing. “It used to be that manufacturing in Poland was four times cheaper than in Finland,” says Ozga. “It’s still cheaper, but nothing like it used to be, and the day will come when it’s not cheaper at all.” 

To prepare for that day, Janów Lubelski is increasing efficiency and automation so that it can be competitive. “We’re focusing on more complex products in the mining industry, for example, where complicated welding is required,” says Ozga, “and we look for complex machining tasks where we can put our CNC centers to work. In December 2021, we added a paint shop. By having the entire chain of operations, we open the door to assembly. We are now ready for turnkey manufacturing for our customers who have sold all their capacity and need assistance.”

How to sleep well

What has such a wide range of business experience, including a decade in the ladies lingerie business, left with Ozga? If he’s learned one lesson he says that it’s to remember the customers pay our salaries.

“You’ve got to defend their interests and protect your own company’s interests at the same time. You have to really take care of them, but I don’t think ‘making them happy’ is the right way to put it. I have a German customer who says he can sleep well when he knows Fortaco is his supplier. I think that’s how to express it: the customer should sleep well. And that’s really why we’re growing.”