ORI Struts, which was previously based in Sharpsburg in Coweta County, has already moved some of its equipment to the 10,000-square-foot building on Campbell Street in Bowdon that formerly housed a department of Carlisle, and the company hopes to host a formal ribbon cutting for the facility by the end of the year, said Mark Jensen, who owns the ORI with his wife Marie.
It’s not known how many new jobs will be created at the Bowdon facility, though it isn’t likely to be many. ORI Struts is a small company, employing eight people currently, and while the company work force will grow, the expansion will only include a couple of new jobs, Jensen said.
About 350 jobs in Bowdon were lost when Carlisle burned and the company decided not to rebuild.
When they first set out to expand their business, the Jensens did not originally plan to move the company’s main operations so far from home. Several attempts at rezoning property in Coweta County were denied, and after not finding any other suitable options close to Sharpsburg, the pair decided to make the leap to Carroll County, where they’re currently looking for a home.
“We ended up in Bowdon because of the fact that Coweta County wasn’t welcoming new industrial businesses, and Bowdon seemed like a good fit,” Jensen said. “Bowdon welcomed us with open arms.”
Jensen first developed an affinity for all-terrain vehicles in the 1970s, driving motorcycles on the dusty dunes of the west. It would be 20 years later before he would turn his love of going where the roads stop into a career.
ORI Struts was officially incorporated in 2002, and several years later, after developing several models of struts, he found one that not only was effective but was also something that had significant marketability. Without advertising, his business has grown in the last decade, and in the last three years, demand for his product has tripled each year.
Jensen’s products are back-ordered for several months, meaning that if a customer were to place an order today, they wouldn’t be able to get it until next year. The high demand is what prompted the expansion, he said, and the new facility should be able to produce goods at a rate five times quicker than the Sharpsburg plant.
Even with the limited manpower, Jensen said, sales of the company’s products know few limits. There are currently suppliers for ORI’s struts in Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom and Indonesia, with a potential supplier to be added in France in the coming months.
Local sales are a different story. Out west and in other countries, there are many public spaces for people to go and ride the type of vehicles for which ORI produces equipment. Comparatively, there are only a dozen such locations in the entire Southeast, and that’s not likely to change any time soon, Jensen said.
“It’s still a popular thing here,” he said. “But there just aren’t that many places to go to enjoy it.”