Fred Shockey - Plastics Industry Transformer

Chairman and CEO, Winsell Incorporated

Fred is a seasoned plastics industry expert, with 22 years’ experience in plastics engineering, processing and material development.

Lifelong Industry Insider

Fred was born and raised in Northeast Ohio, where his family has been in the polymer industry for over 100 years. He earned a Masters in Polymer Engineering from The University of Akron and subsequently spent several years moving up the corporate ladder with global organizations. With Figgie International he was a member of the consulting team for mergers and acquisitions. During his tenure at Newell Rubbermaid, his work as a process engineer saved the company millions in resin costs. As a Senior Marketing Technical Service Representative for Advanced Elastomer Systems, he solved a variety of injection molding problems and performed a critical customer support role responding to technical Q&As in the Answer forum.

Fred was in the thick of it during the good old days where success in the plastics industry could be realized based on two key factors: price plus relationship. He, like many, enjoyed great success with this model, which allowed him to build a thriving private label distribution company called IURINC, which he launched in 1995. Fred spent many years in the trenches providing color solutions in a wide variety of processing environments and applications.

Creation of Winsell

In 2009 Fred realized that the shortest distance to success for both himself and his customers was to create unique differentiated value. Thus Winsell was born, to express his objective of partnering with customers to "find ways to win." Shortly after Fred launched Winsell, he spotted an underserved gap in the market: granite colorants. Yes, there were players in this space, but most of them treated granite as an afterthought. And he saw a lot of pain and frustration in granite end-users. Winsell today specializes in innovation and improvement of the granite-effect colorants for plastic rotational molding. His customers rave about the problems he solves for their businesses. In this case, “no pain” leads to “gain.”

“We All Win”

"I cannot imagine work that is more rewarding, says Fred. "When I initially work with customers, they’ve historically been experiencing pain and frustration in their use of granite colorants. We transform their world, and take away the pain and replace it with easy processing, reduced costs and spot-on color matching – and that’s when the fun begins. Because better granite-effects means superior products and competitive advantage. We all win.”