Shurtape Technologies grew out of Shuford Mills, a longtime maker of textile yarns and a world leading manufacturer of cordage and twine. In 1955, Shuford Mills management started a tape division to capture a growing demand for basic crepe and flat back paper tapes – the stuff everyone knows as masking tape. That year we opened a small pilot plant tucked into a corner of the larger Shuford Mills factory in Hickory, North Carolina.

We managed to do a lot of things right; our early success with that pilot plant led Shuford Mills to invest in an entire factory dedicated to manufacturing tape. Today, we have 12 factories worldwide producing 700 million square yards of tape annually – enough to wrap a 2” strip around the world more than 280 times. You’ll find that tape just about everywhere – at plants, offices, homes and worksites, and at such familiar retail stores as Ace Hardware, Lowe’s, Office Max, Sears, Staples, Wal-Mart, and many more.

Encouraged for two decades by steady growth and profitability, Shuford Mills expanded tape production and its offering to adhesive-coated cloth tapes in 1972. The manufacturing operation in Hickory fueled growth for the next 10 years; its success set the stage for Shuford Mills to convert its Stony Point Yarn Mill to a duct tape factory in 1981. (By the way, we’re the company that makes the original duct tape.)

By 1996, the small tape division of Shuford Mills outpaced the sales and profitability of legacy textile products. Shuford Mills management elected to spin off the tape division into a separately managed and operated company – what’s known today as Shurtape Technologies.

Emboldened as a "young" company, Shurtape managers were aggressive in launching new products during the first year – notably high quality hot-melt carton sealing tapes made in a new 100,000 square foot factory in Hudson, North Carolina. We also expanded our geographic reach by acquiring Kip, a distributor based in Germany with operations throughout Europe, and by starting converting operations in Mexico, Peru and The United Arab Emirates. These capabilities – miles and miles away from our western North Carolina roots – provided Shurtape the infrastructure to export our goods and better serve our growing portfolio of multi-national customers.

In 2000, we opened a state of the art plant in Hickory producing masking, foil, printed, and laminated tapes and a converting facility in Singapore – keeping our home base vital and growing while also building our presence internationally.