John Loewen founded Icon Technologies Limited in 1998 from nothing.
“We started in a two-car garage, me and one employee who is still with the company,” said Loewen, Icon president. “We built our first thermoforming machine from scratch.” Today, Icon supplies products to RV aftermarket distributors and helps OEM customers enhance their thermoformed and rotational molded plastic parts.
Icon’s first products were OE components for Type B motorhome manufacturers. The company made fender skirts, shower pans, overhead consoles and exterior compartment doors mainly for Leisure Travel Brands, a Canadian RV manufacturer that still works with Icon today and is the company’s neighbor.
Loewen said, “I can almost see their building from here.”
In 2001, Westman Plastics, a small aftermarket thermoforming company an estimated four-hour drive from Icon’s headquarters in Manitoba, Canada, closed its doors. Loewen bought the company’s tooling, product line, equipment and inventory and, with it, an extensive customer list.
Repurposing and enhancing Westman Plastics’ assets under the Icon Technologies Limited brand was a pivotal point in Icon’s history.
“It was important to us to retain the customer and to emphasize that we had a different business philosophy than they might have experienced in the past,” Loewen said. “It took a lot of effort to change the tooling, but also the customers’ perceptions of what the product line was.”
To serve these customers, Icon started selling online products straight-to-consumer in 2005. Website visitors who cannot find a replacement part are asked to send broken parts that needed fixing to Icon. When broken parts arrive, Icon scans and digitally reconstructs them before cutting a new mold. The company sends back an exact duplicate of the part before it was broken, made with better materials.
“That’s how we built this business,” Loewen said, “Customers and dealers take broken parts, throw them in a corn flakes box and send it to us. That is how we built the library of new products, and we continue to do that today.”
Customization and the ability to reproduce obsolete parts propelled Icon into 23 years of successful business. Loewen estimates 60 percent of Icon’s services are dedicated to the RV aftermarket, and the rest are OEM efforts. Today, Icon supplies products like underskirts, RV holding tanks, skylights and vent covers to more than 20 distributors in the U.S. and Canada. Winkler & District Chamber of Commerce has awarded Icon for business excellence several times since 2016.
