The story began over 53 years ago, back in 1953 when Claude Smith founded NuWay Speaker Products. The original plant was located in Franklin Park, Illinois, a suburb on the northwest side of Chicago.  NuWay’s original line of business, and still the mainstay of the business today, was making spiders/dampers for the Loudspeaker Industry.

During the first 20 years, the company experienced slow but steady growth.  By the mid-70’s NuWay began to see a bigger increase in sales due to the start up of seamed cone production and in 1976 we opened our second facility in Antioch, Illinois, about 45 mile north of our original Franklin Park Plant.  The location in Antioch is now the Corporate Headquarters.

Original Antioch Location

 In the early 1980’s we built an addition in Antioch to house the molded cone department and by 1985 we were in production on our first molded paper cones.  Again our growth continued at a steady pace although at a considerably faster pace and in 1995 we built our newest facility in Antioch, right across the street from the original Antioch Plant.  This plant now houses the spider & dust cap production as well as tooling, maintenance, warehouse and corporate offices.

 In 1998 NuWay purchased another facility in Clinton, North Carolina.  The Clinton Facility was previously owned by International Jenson Incorporated and manufactures molded paper cones and some poly cones.

In 2002 NuWay opened our newest plant in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Our newest spider facility is running at full capacity utilizing 2 shifts.

 NuWay currently has about 150 customers and is one of the the largest soft-good component manufacturer in North America.  NuWay is still owned and operated by the Smith family with Claude functioning as CEO, Dennis Smith as President and Jim Smith as Vice-President.  We currently have approximately 320 full time employees combined in all facilities, running two shifts.