E Craftsmen celebrates 60 years of business in Waterloo

Nov. 3, 2016 – Next Tuesday, local politicians and community members will be on hand to help E Craftsmen Corp., a manufacturer of customer transformers and inductors, celebrate 60 years of business in the Waterloo, Ont., region.

The company, formerly known as Electronic Craftsmen, was founded by Fred Sayers who incorporated the enterprise in 1956 after purchasing assets from the Electro Coil Company.

“I have the financial records from that first year of business,” said Tom Bresele, who started as a junior design engineer at E Craftsmen 33 years ago before climbing the ranks to his current role as president. “It was ridiculous… something like $200 or $300 in sales.

One secret to its success is its ability to adapt to international issues and technology shifts, said the company in a statement.

“Change or die, I call it. We’ll always adapt to what our customers need. We’ll always have an emerging-technology customer in our pipeline,” explained Bresele.

Today, a team of about 50 serves international clients in fields that include industrial automation, aerospace, renewables and aviation.

“It’s a lot of diversity. We’ll churn out 300 or so designs every year and that’ll turn into 100 different new parts; we learn something new every single day,” says Blaine Gray, vice president at E Craftsmen. “People will always need transformers, maybe differently, but we’ll adapt to that, too. We’ve made it 60 years; we’ve got another 60 ahead of us.”