Brian Lane

Author Archives: Brian Lane

  1. The Hidden Costs of Imported Adhesive Tapes: What OEMs Must Know

    Leave a Comment

    Adhesive tapes play a crucial role in modern manufacturing and packaging. Whether they are used for bonding or sealing, adhesive tapes keep operations running smoothly in electronics, automotive, aerospace, and general industrial production.

    At first glance, imported adhesive tapes may appear to be a budget-friendly option for OEMs seeking to reduce costs. But beneath the low price tag lies a tangle of hidden expenses and risks that can disrupt your supply chain and hurt your bottom line. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the additional costs behind imported adhesive tapes and explain how purchasing domestic adhesive tapes can save OEMs time and money in the long run.

    Tariffs and Hidden Expenses

    Many manufacturers are drawn to imported adhesive tapes because of their surface-level cost savings. Often, the initial price per roll is displayed as lower than what you’d find from a domestic supplier.

    However, this number doesn’t reflect the actual total cost of ownership. Here’s how additional costs can add up:

    • Import tariffs. Depending on the country of origin, tariffs can increase your cost by 25% or more.
    • Shipping fees. Ocean freight is neither cheap nor fast. Rising fuel prices, surcharges, and container shortages all contribute to higher costs.
    • Delays at customs. Border delays can lead to stalled production lines and missed deadlines, presenting a costly gamble for any original equipment manufacturer (OEM).
    • Quality inconsistency. Many imported tapes fail to meet the same performance standards or quality control benchmarks. When those tapes don’t perform as they should, product failures and replacements cut into your margins.
    • Compliance risks. Non-compliant tapes can result in fines, returns, or recalls.
    Hidden CostReal-World Impact
    Import tariffsIncreased overall cost per order
    Long shipping timesDelays in manufacturing & delivery
    Inconsistent qualityIncreased product failures & complaints
    Compliance risksRegulatory fines or rejected shipments

    The Benefits of Made-in-America Products

    Choosing adhesive tapes made in the USA comes with many advantages, including:

    • No tariffs. Eliminate surprise fees and added import costs.
    • Fast shipping. Domestic shipments don’t sit in port for weeks—they show up when you need them.
    • Full quality control. With local production comes higher visibility into how your tape is made and tested.
    • Easier communication. Time zone alignment and shared language make coordination smoother and faster.
    • Standards compliance. High-quality tapes are manufactured per ISO 9001:2015 standards, which provides users with confidence in both their performance and traceability.

    In addition, sourcing locally strengthens the U.S. economy, reduces your environmental footprint, and ensures greater resilience in your supply chain.

    At Advantage Adhesives, you can count on getting customized solutions for your exact application. Whether you’re designing a product that requires specific adhesion strength or you need tapes engineered for a harsh environment, our team can tailor a solution to your requirements.

    Advantage Adhesives: Unbeatable Quality and Custom Capabilities

    Our mission at Advantage Adhesives is simple: to manufacture custom pressure-sensitive adhesive tapes with consistent quality, innovation, and service. Every roll of tape we produce is the result of close communication with our customers and suppliers, continuous process improvement, and attention to detail.

    As a leading custom adhesive tape manufacturer, we offer several competitive advantages that set us apart:

    • ISO certification. Our adherence to ISO 9001:2015 standards ensures consistent quality with every product we deliver.
    • Customization at scale. We specialize in tailoring tapes to unique applications, overcoming the limitations of off-the-shelf products.
    • Trusted by OEMs nationwide. Our partners rely on us for reliable lead times, responsive customer service, and solutions that perform under challenging conditions.
    • USA-made. Unlike overseas suppliers, our products are made right here in Ontario, California, which gives customers an additional level of visibility, accessibility, and trust.

    Choose American-Made Solutions from Advantage Adhesives

    If you’re considering imported adhesive tape to cut costs, it may be time to reevaluate your approach. Between tariffs, customs delays, and inconsistent product performance, offshore sourcing often leads to more headaches than savings. Choose a U.S.-based manufacturer like Advantage Adhesives to gain the advantages of speed, precision, quality, and accountability.

    Whether you’re building a new product line or upgrading your existing tape solutions, we’re ready to supply you with high-quality, cost-competitive adhesive tape made in the USA. We offer transfer tapes, pressure-sensitive adhesive tapes, single-coated tapes, double-coated tapes, and more.

    Contact us today to discover how our custom tape solutions can save you time, reduce risk, and boost your product performance.

  2. Reliable Products: Advantage Adhesives Commitment to Quality

    Leave a Comment

    Pressure-Sensitive Adhesive (PSA) tape performs many vital functions across industries, from sealing corrugated packages and bubble bag closures and envelopes, to various medical and construction applications. Advantage Adhesives offers top-quality adhesive tape products, with a commitment to providing superior customer service and timely delivery with every solution. As a result, we set some of the highest standards in our industry.

    Advantage Adhesives’ Unique Offerings

    Part of what helps Advantage Adhesives stand apart is our ability to tailor each product to the customer’s individual requirements. Based on each project’s needs, we provide personalized services with flexible designs and large-scale production capabilities. Some of our specific capabilities include:

    • Custom coating
    • Slitting
    • Spooling

    We also offer a line of raw material options for our customers. For instance, we provide a variety of adhesive types, including:

    • Removable/Resealable adhesives
    • Permanent high-temperature and permanent high-tack adhesives
    • Freezer-grade adhesives

    We also carry a selection of liners, including:

    • PET (Polyester)
    • Metallized PET
    • Paper (various thicknesses and grades)
    • BOPP (Biaxially-Oriented Polypropylene)
    • PE (Polyethylene)

    Additionally, customers can choose from multiple carriers, such as:

    • PE
    • PET
    • Foam
    • PP
    • Fabrics

    The Importance of Compliance in Adhesive Manufacturing

    Adhesives used within the food, medical, and many other industries must pass a stringent set of regulations and requirements to guarantee reliable performance. Quality control for adhesives offers several primary advantages:

    • Ensuring consistency and reliability
    • Meeting industry standards and regulations
    • Enhancing product performance and longevity
    • Building customer trust and loyalty
    • Driving continuous improvement and innovation

    Advantage Adhesives Certifications and Quality Standards 

    When you need the best adhesive products available on the market, turn to Advantage Adhesives. Our continued success depends on an increasingly higher measure of quality, which is the key to our sustained success. We are highly detail-oriented, with a dedication to continual improvement across all of our offerings. We also work to maintain effective communication between our company and both our customers and trusted suppliers.

    As such, we set particularly high standards with our customized pressure-sensitive adhesive tapes. We imbue every project with equal devotion to quality, excellence, and innovation, maintaining an honest and integral approach to relationships with our employees, suppliers, and customers. 

    In the process of manufacturing custom solutions, we pay close attention to each customer’s unique requirements to provide them with the most innovative, compatible product. We also continue to keep up with our ever-evolving industry and adapt to sustain our long-term growth and expansion. These qualities make us one of the most trusted partners our customers can turn to for their adhesive solutions, whether they are in the market for adhesive tapes, foam tapes, or tissue tapes.

    Our ISO certification, specifically ISO 9001:2015 certification for our Quality Management System, helps demonstrate our commitment to quality. This certification applies to our ability to produce high-quality adhesive-coated tapes, along with slitting, coating, and spooling services.

    Partner with Advantage Adhesives for Quality Adhesives and Services

    Whenever you’re seeking high-quality, sustainable adhesive tapes and other products, turn to the professionals at Advantage Adhesives. It’s best to work with a provider that can meet your specific application needs with sufficient in-house capabilities and on-time delivery. We will learn what you need in a custom adhesive, developing a top-quality product that is designed and manufactured to last. Our line of products includes:

    All of these adhesive tapes can help save you more time and money, giving you the results you need while maximizing cost-effectiveness. To learn more about how Advantage Adhesives can help with your adhesive needs, please contact us today.

  3. It Was 20 Years Ago This Week…

    Leave a Comment

    It was 20 years ago this week, that Greg Lane started Advantage Adhesives, Inc. He set out to build a company built around products of uncompromising quality and excellent service; to build an organization that was focused on dealing with customers, suppliers and employees with honesty and integrity; to find solutions rather than pushing off the shelf products on our customers problems; by being innovative and thinking outside of the box.

    It is fun to think about the early days, to look back on pictures when we were all a little bit younger and our equipment was shiny and new. Its inspiring to walk out into our manufacturing facility and think back on the days where we occupied a small corner in the back of someone else’s warehouse. Greg often tells a story from the early days about issuing a PO for cores for our very first customer. It was a big deal for Greg to sign that first PO. It wasn’t a lot, but at the time, it was. He held onto it for 3 days, pulling it out and looking at it and then putting it back into his desk, until he got up the courage to take that leap. There are many small milestones that were exciting, like getting a brand-new coating line, or slitter. When we started we didn’t even have the capability to coat. One of the biggest moments for us was coating our first master roll of tape. We only ran it at 50 feet per minute, but it was special. It was the start of in house coating capabilities that would be tweaked and improved to get us to where we are today. Today we run 3 coating lines, 6 slitters, and 2 spooling lines.

    It is not about machines or buildings though, but rather about the people who have made us who we are today. It is the relationships we have built with our many great suppliers who decided to sell the small new guy a few boxes of adhesive, or the liner supplier who agreed to make a few hundred feet of the liner when the big guys wouldn’t even take the phone call. It is about the customers who have leaned on us for our expertise, and our commitment to service. It is our customers who have counted on us to deliver a quality product, that is on time and priced right. Most importantly though, it is about our employees who have put in the hard work and long hours to work through problems and working late to make sure that equipment got fixed or that an urgent order got out to our customer in need. Greg likes to talk about having good employees in this way, “You can put me in a Ferrari, and Mario Andretti in a Yugo, and Mario Andretti will beat me every time.” Mario doesn’t win because Greg is a bad driver. Mario wins because he is an excellent driver. Our employees are the best around and it is due to their care and constant attention to detail that we can provide the best tape on the market today.

    Our 1st production roll of PSA tape made in house.

    We have been busy in the past year working on growing our customer base and the products we can provide them. To do this we added a new inside sales position. We also took it upon ourselves to become ISO9001:2015 registered, which was not an easy process. We didn’t undertake this because we were told to do it by a customer, we did it because we wanted to be better.

    Over the course of these last 20 years, we have experienced tremendous growth. Our expectations for Advantage Adhesives for the next 20 years is to continue to make Advantage a better place to work for our employees, increase our capabilities, develop new ways to be able to enhance our customers ability to interact with us, and continue to make it easy for our customers to work with us. We owe our highest thanks to our customers, suppliers and employees as we continue our growth during the next 20 years.

    If you are an existing customer call us to talk about your new requirements. If you are not yet one of our customers, please give us a call and we will show you what we can do for you.

    Welcome to the next 20 years!

  4. Advantage Adhesives, Inc. attains registration to the ISO 9001:2015 standard.

    Leave a Comment

    Posted by: Advantage Adhesives, Inc.

    Rancho Cucamonga, CA – October 10, 2017 – Advantage Adhesives, Inc. is proud to announce its successful registration to the ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System standard by Bureau Veritas, effective October 10, 2017.

    Our decision to obtain ISO 9001 registration was driven by a desire to meet customer needs and to increase customer satisfaction, and demonstrates our commitment to providing a high-quality and consistent product to our customers.

    To become ISO 9001 compliant, AAI underwent an evaluation process that included quality management system development, a management system documentation review, pre-audit, initial assessment, and clearance of non-conformances. This process has, and will continue to drive improvement in our products and processes.

    For your records, AAI’s registration numbers and scope are as follows:

    Standard: ISO 9001:2015

    Certificate Number: US010670

    Scope: The manufacture and sale of adhesive coated tapes, as well as other coating, slitting, and spooling activities.

    An electronic copy of our certificate of registration can be found on our website: www.advantageadhesives.com.

  5. Advantage Adhesives, Inc. Hires Lucien Adan as the Inside Sales Representative

    Leave a Comment

    Posted by: Advantage Adhesives, Inc.

    Rancho Cucamonga, CA – October 1, 2017 – Advantage Adhesives, Inc. is happy to announce that Lucien Adan has been hired as an Inside Sales Representative. Lucien brings a great deal of experience in Business Development and will help create partnerships with new clients.Lucien has more than 18 years of sales and marketing experience in the financial and whole sale distribution industries. He brings with him the skill set needed to create strong relationships and above and beyond satisfied clients.
    Lucien grew up in New York City where he started his Sales career in the financial services industry. He moved to California in 2006 to pursue a business opportunity and become a co-owner of a Wholesale Distribution company. In his free time he enjoys coaching his kids’ soccer teams and going camping with them.

  6. Advantage Adhesives, Inc. Hires Chris Powell as Quality Manager

    Leave a Comment

    Posted by: Advantage Adhesives, Inc.

    Rancho Cucamonga, CA – June 21, 2016 – Advantage Adhesives, Inc. is proud to announce that Chris Powell has been hired as Quality Manager. Chris brings a great deal of experience in Quality Management to the table and will help to maintain our strict standards of quality as well as lead us into some new and exciting improvements.

    Chris has more than 16 years of experience in the silicone release liner industry (and close to 19 in manufacturing), with an extensive Quality and Product Development background. He has worked with film, paper, and polycoated substrates; UV and thermal silicones; as well as water based inks and other coatings. Chris also has experience with a variety of coating, printing, and slitting processes across a broad spectrum of web widths.

    Chris is originally from Massachusetts, but has lived in New Jersey, Wisconsin, Delaware, and has recently moved to California. He speaks fluent Spanish, a skill he acquired when he was stationed outside of Madrid while in the Air Force. Chris has been married for almost 25 years, and his wife is from Spain.