How do you manufacture the impossible?
At MD&M West 2025, Gary Hulecki (CEO, MTD Micro Molding) sat down with Tony Demakis to discuss high-precision, ultra-small medical molding and why being 100% made in America matters.
Here are some highlights from the interview, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tony: So what is MTD Micro Molding?
Gary: MTD Micro Molding is a contract manufacturer for med device companies. So we do pretty much all injection molding with thermal plastic materials and bioabsorbables. And the “micro” comes from everything being under an inch. So anything smaller than an inch is what we mold. We do all of our own tooling in-house. We do some assembly and packaging. We have all the ISO certs to be able to do that.
Tony: I think what’s really cool is that you’re not piecemeal. It’s all under one roof, right? So you have molding and the mold building all in one location. What does that do for you guys?
Gary: First, I couldn’t imagine doing what we do without having in-house tooling. A lot of times, we’re taking on projects that nobody else wants. So to be able to have the tooling people collaborating with the molding people, we don’t run into trivial problems. We don’t run into any kind of finger-pointing. Typically, if the mold is outsourced, there’s always some sort of issue with the tool or the process. We kind of eliminate that being vertically integrated.
Tony: What I love is that you basically said you are 100% medical, 100% micro, and that you like to look for the impossible.
Gary: Yeah, everything we take has to have some level of impossibility. There are a lot of molders out there. They do some small parts, but they’re washers. We mold only feature-rich parts, high-aspect ratios—stuff that really nobody wants to do.
Tony: I think that’s amazing because so many people out there, they think, “What’s the easy road?” Right? Like, “Tee one up for us.” Let’s play T-ball instead of hardball, right? So I appreciate companies like yours that say, “I don’t want the easy job. I want the most difficult, complex, serious thing that you have so that we can prove to you who we are and what makes us different.”
Gary: Exactly. Our whole team is a problem-solving team. We have people just dedicated to R&D to uncover phenomenons that we came into for even machining parts or or even processing the the type of plastic that we have.
Tony: People are a big part of what you do.
Yes. Anybody can buy the equipment that we have, but it’s really the pilots that we put in front of them that actually get the results that that we achieve because they’re not afraid to fail. That’s how we learn. That’s how everybody learns. So we build in the patience and the time to get it right.
Tony: You have to fail up.
Gary: Exactly.
Tony: What size team are you guys working with?
Gary: We have a total of 43 people at our facility. We only have seven tool makers. As you know, tool makers are very hard to find.
Tony: They are. It’s like a unicorn.
Gary: It truly is. We have people in their 60s and 70s, and then we have people in their 20s. You go to colleges, and you get an education, and that’s great that you had a program CAD, but the actual hand fitting, hand polishing? That’s not really something that you learn in college. That’s something that you need to do in the shop with somebody staring over your shoulder, who’s done it for years.
Tony: Yeah, we find that all the time. It’s really, really difficult to find somebody that knows how to problem solve, right? You can teach somebody how to run a CNC machine. You can teach somebody how to read a print. But when something goes wrong, how do you identify those sorts of things? And I think the fact that you guys have the molding and the mold making all in one location, that’s a huge advantage for you over another company.
Gary: It is. And we do have some technologies. I think we’re the only ones in the country that have EDM milling technology. We have 20-micron wiring machines. So it really is unique, and that’s what allows us to do these impossible projects.
Tony: Now, anybody can say that they’re a great place to work. Anybody can say that they have great people. Anybody can say that my company does things better than other people, but you guys actually can back that up.
Gary: Yeah, we can. So we’ve won for the past seven years in a row, Best Places to Work for through Plastics News.
Tony: So that speaks, right?
Gary: I think it does, yeah.
Tony: I think what people don’t understand is that it’s not based on what you say about your company when you submit things for Plastics News. How do they determine who makes the Best Places to Work?
It’s the employees. I don’t get to fill out any of the survey stuff. And they ask them some pretty challenging questions, too. They do some personal interviews with some of the newest employees and some of the employees who have been there for 10 or 15 years. They also talk to some of our customers to see how they feel when they’re when they’re working with us.
Tony: So one of the things that’s really important to me and I’m passionate about is the idea of Made in America.
Gary: Yes. We have one facility located an hour west of Boston, and everything is made at our facility. We don’t outsource anything, from any of the tooling to even some of the purchase components—are all made in the United States.
Tony: Yeah, it’s, I think it speaks to a different level of accountability and serviceability and results-driven success, because if something’s not working, they’re coming directly to you. Right?
Gary: Exactly. Like I said, our team is very well-versed in molding and tooling. So even the tool makers go through a training class with some of the molding engineers to understand the vocabulary that they’re using when they’re molding the parts, and also the different technology that they use so that they understand and can apply that while they’re building the tool.
Tony: One of the things that I thought was cool was how you said that a perfect customer for you guys is somebody who has gone to other places and has tried to get done what they’re trying to get done, and other companies may no quote it, or they may say it’s not possible, or they can’t do it. And then they come back to you.
Gary: Exactly. We have many stories of people who’ve tried to get the results that we’re achieving, and they end up going with someone a little less costly who has probably done some great macro molding, so they’re willing to give them a shot. But in the end, they always end up coming back to us. About 30% of the projects we take every year are either no-quoted or failed by someone else.
Tony: 30% of your projects, other people say, “We can do this!” and then when push comes to shove, they fail. And sometimes, for the customer, that’s a huge, huge step backward, right?
Gary: In the med device industry, a lot of the OEMs are working on the same type of project, and usually, the first one to market gets the lion’s share of that. So it’s very critical. Timing is very critical. So you really need to do what you say you can do to have the reputation and the trust for the customer to come see you.
Tony: And time is money, right? So if you’re planning to go to market in a year, and it ends up taking you three years, because the first person says, we can knock this out for you in six months. And then they fail, and then you go to the next place, and they go, we can knock it out in six months. And then you fail. You’ve spent time, money, resources, energy. And, like you said, there’s an opportunity for somebody else to go to market before you
Gary: Right. You could lose tens of millions of dollars by picking the wrong vendor.
Tony: So how did you get into this industry?
Gary: So I went to trade school and took a mold-making course—a tool and die course. And I spent the first five years just building molds. And then I went to another company, and it was a mold-building company, and all of a sudden, I’m 23 years old, and I’m an engineering manager without an engineering degree.
Tony: Yeah, fun, right?
Gary: Yeah. So there was a lot of friction there, but we survived and I’ve held a management position ever since. I came to MTD about 21 or 22 years ago. I was employee number four and started doing EDM work, milling work for tooling, and eventually learned how to do injection molding and worked my way up to Executive Vice President and then to CEO.