An Eye on the Future : Lens Maker a Good Example of Southland’s Pride, Hope
Younger Optics is an innovative company, a maker of eyeglass lenses that turn dark in sunlight and lighter indoors, and the developer of the seamless bifocal and other products.
It is growing rapidly, sales have doubled in the last three years and its work force of 300 employees could rise to double that number in the next five years if the company’s plans are realized.
In short, Younger is just the kind of company Los Angeles, or any city, wants to have--fast growing, with enough technology in its production system to employ highly skilled people and sufficient bulk operations to employ less-skilled workers. Younger molds and casts the blank plastic forms that opticians turn into prescription eyeglasses.
Thus the company is a pretty good example of the huge biomedical industry, which includes more than 800 firms in Los Angeles County and 1,200 in Orange County and is the pride and hope of Southern California.
That’s why the Los Angeles mayor’s office, along with RLA (formerly Rebuild L.A.) and UCLA, is trying to help Younger--and why other cities, including Sacramento, are trying to lure it away.
But there is an added significance to Younger, a family company dating to 1954, the year Irving Rips came from Omaha and began developing lenses that made people look, well, younger. The company does its work in four separate facilities, some of them dilapidated, in South-Central Los Angeles.
Its employees and operations have suffered from crime. So the mayor’s office is trying to get it more secure space immediately--but so far the company has run into bureaucratic delays from municipal agencies in trying to convert a city-owned lot that is now being used for storage.
Longer-term, Younger needs to build a modern plant with a “clean room” and other high-tech facilities--a major capital hurdle for a firm that has only now grown to roughly $25 million in annual sales.
Mayor Richard Riordan and City Councilwoman Rita Walters have both assured Younger of their support, and various forms of city-backed credit are being studied as the company formulates specific plans for a new plant.
“I’ll say everybody at every level of government wants to make Younger succeed,” says David Rips, the founder’s son who is now chief executive.
But Thomas Balch, Younger’s executive vice president and an industry veteran, adds, “We’re struggling against adversity, and while we’re in discussions with the city, nothing has happened yet.”
So the question remains whether a high-tech plant will be built in South-Central, now largely inhabited by fortress-like garment factories surrounded by fences topped with razor wire.
Despite the essential problem of crime, the biomedical industry otherwise thrives in urban settings.
“Often the more urban the better, because you can get a mix of rich and poor patients and a variety of medical problems,” says Glen Matsushima, head of Matsushima & Associates, a 15-employee firm in Long Beach that makes braces and artificial limbs.
Matsushima, who was born in Carson, was the first graduate 10 years ago of the Cal State Dominguez Hills program in orthotics and prosthetics, the formal names for the science of braces and artificial limbs.
Now he has a company with prosthetic practices in Burbank and Stanton, as well as Long Beach, where he also owns a manufacturing plant.
Matsushima credits the intellectual infrastructure of the Cal State program--one of only eight U.S. programs training professionals in the science of artificial limbs--and the nearby Rancho Los Amigos medical center in Downey for keeping the region a leader in biomedicine.
The art of prosthetics has come a long way from wooden legs, Matsushima explains. New lightweight and flexible materials even duplicate the spring in a step, and microcomputers inserted in elbows allow artificial hands to work off the electrical impulses of nerves in the forearm.
The only shadow on such progress, Matsushima says, is that intense pressure to control medical costs could discourage use of advanced devices. A standard artificial limb costs about $4,000, he says, while a more comfortable limb could run to $9,000. “The difference is in quality of life,” he says.
But improving quality of life can be worth a lot. It drove three San Clemente professionals--a urologist, an orthopedic surgeon and an engineer--to develop surgical devices for urethra repair to alleviate female incontinence on an outpatient basis.
The company they formed, Vesica Medical Inc., is an example of several trends in Orange County’s biomedical industry.
One is the high level of financial activity. Vesica started up in October, 1992, with $3 million in venture capital from Kevin Conners of DSV Partners--who became Vesica’s chief executive. Last May, it won Food and Drug Administration approval for its surgical devices, and it has already sold itself to Boston Scientific, a large medical implement firm, for a price that will return eight times the backers’ initial capital.
“Big companies are sure to come up with similar treatments, so selling out was the better part of valor,” Conners says.
Vesica is also an example of how biomedical operations--which now directly employ close to 80,000 people in Southern California--can move into the abandoned or downsized facilities of the defense industry. Vesica used an electronics clean room to develop its products.
And there is other space available. “I know a guy who has two clean rooms to lease,” Conners says.
Younger Optics could take advantage of such availability if it moved to Orange County. But it doesn’t want to, says Rips, and it may not have to.
If Younger can formulate a good expansion plan, Los Angeles may be able to come up with financial help. One way could be from the Community Development Bank, which will be formed to funnel loans to inner-city businesses if the federal government comes through with an appropriation for empowerment zones.
But help better hurry. Younger, with its technological manufacturing processes and product lines, is attracting attention from a lot of places richer than South-Central Los Angeles.
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Picture of Health
Southern California’s biomedical industry is one of the region’s fastest-growing. These companies produce everything from wheelchairs to kidney stone pulverizers to magnetic resonance imaging systems. A brief look at the industry: * About 2,500 biomedical manufacturers call one of the 10 counties from San Luis Obispo to San Diego home. More than 800 are in Los Angeles County, and these employ about 34,000 people and have a combined yearly revenue of about $4 billion. Orange County is home to about 1,200 biomedical companies. * At least 95% of all medical manufacturers in Southern California are privately held. * Lower-income areas in Los Angeles County (as classified by Rebuild L.A., now known as RLA) contain about 25% of the county’s biomedical companies. * About 15% to 20% of the biomedical industry’s output is exported, with most products going to Asia, Canada and Europe. * According to the Food and Drug Administration, the number of medical manufacturers nationwide has tripled since 1980. The medical device industry now posts profits of more than $30 billion a year.
Sources: Biomedical Market Newsletter, Life Science Industry Council, Medical Industry Directory of Southern California Companies, RLA, Times reports Researched by JENNIFER OLDHAM / Los Angeles Times
