Hexcel Brand Guidelines: A 1948 Berkeley Honeycomb Start-up Turned Stamford Composites Maker

A basement workshop and a radome contract.

Hexcel began in the San Francisco Bay Area just after the Second World War. English Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1948 as California Reinforced Plastics by a group of engineers from the University of California at Berkeley. The company’s own history names Roger C. Steele and Roscoe T. “Bud” Hughes as its co-founders: two friends from Piedmont High School who had served in the Navy together, and who were joined in 1948 by the chemist Ken Holland and the economist Paul Ammen. Hexcel says Steele spent almost two years working in the Hughes family’s basement, building machines from spare parts to make what it calls expanded honeycomb, while Hughes kept the venture going with his salary as a university engineer.

The business was incorporated in September 1948, the company says, and its first contract came from the Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson: research into fibreglass honeycomb for the radomes of military aircraft. Wikipedia gives the same first contract. Hexcel says its next step was an intentionally low bid to supply fuel-cell support panels for the wings of the B-36 bomber, and that the bid paid off.

The name came six years later. In 1954 California Reinforced Plastics became Hexcel Products, Inc., and English Wikipedia explains that the name was taken from the hexagonal cells of the honeycomb the company made. That one shape still sits at the centre of the story the company tells about itself, in which Steele believed honeycomb was the most efficient structure that could be built. Hexcel opened its first plant outside the United States in 1967 at Welkenraedt in Belgium, according to its timeline, and moved into sport for a while: Wikipedia records that Hexcel licensed a ski design in 1970 and later sold the ski business to concentrate on aerospace, and the company says it left skis and medical products around 1980.

Honeycomb, prepregs and carbon fibre.

Hexcel sells materials rather than finished aircraft. Its website groups them into carbon fibre, adhesives, fabrics and reinforcements, honeycomb, prepregs and resins, and tooling, under trade names such as HexTow carbon fibre, HexWeb honeycomb, HexPly prepregs and Redux film adhesives. English Wikipedia says the company’s products go into commercial and military aircraft, space launch vehicles and satellites, wind-turbine blades, sports equipment and cars.

Some of its most widely reported work is in space. Wikipedia says the landing pads of the Apollo 11 lunar module in 1969 were built from Hexcel honeycomb, and the company describes them as footpads of crushable honeycomb foil. Wikipedia also says Hexcel supplied materials for the nose, doors and wings of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1981, and most of the material in the fuselage and wings of the Rutan Voyager, the aircraft that flew non-stop around the world in 1986.

Much of the modern business came through acquisition. Hexcel’s timeline says it bought Ciba-Geigy’s composites business in February 1996 and the composites operation of Hercules in June of that year; with Ciba came the Duxford site in England, where the physicist Norman de Bruyne had set up Aero Research in 1934 and where the Redux adhesives were developed. Wikipedia adds the Fiberite satellite prepreg line in 1997 and smaller purchases in 2017 and 2018. The company says it opened a prepreg plant at Stade in Germany in 2007 and in 2008 won a contract to supply carbon-fibre prepregs for the primary structures of the Airbus A350 XWB. Wikipedia records a plant in Casablanca, Morocco, opened in March 2018 for engineered honeycomb parts, a carbon-fibre plant at Roussillon in France the same year, and a factory at Salaise-sur-Sanne near Lyon, opened in July 2018, that makes the carbon-fibre precursor polyacrylonitrile; it was the second such plant after Decatur, Alabama.

How aerospace suppliers present themselves.

Aerospace suppliers sell to a small number of buyers, and their imagery is built for engineers, airlines and investors rather than for passengers. The product is usually hidden inside someone else’s aircraft, so the pictures tend to show it before it disappears: an engine bolted to a test stand, a single fan blade lit in a studio, a fuselage section on a factory floor, or a cutaway drawing that opens up the layers of a turbofan or a landing-gear leg.

Factories are part of the story. Clean rooms, composite lay-up tables and long assembly halls appear again and again, often with people in them: apprentices, engineers and technicians in overalls, shown at work rather than posing. Many of these companies are joint ventures, partners or subcontractors on the same programmes, so a single engine or wing can carry the work of several firms, each telling its own part of it.

The trade has its own stages. The Paris Air Show at Le Bourget and the Farnborough show in England alternate year by year, and suppliers take chalets and stands there alongside the aircraft makers they serve. Services after delivery are a large part of the business too, and the language of aftermarket support, spare parts and maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) runs through their websites and reports.

Corporate reports often put an aircraft on the cover, even when the company makes none of it. Behind that shared look sit very different histories: century-old engine makers, plants sold off by aircraft builders, conglomerate spin-outs and private-equity buyouts. The guides in this series set out what can be checked about each one, and mark clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

Chapter 11, Stamford and a merger that stopped.

Hexcel’s path was not smooth. The company says it filed voluntarily for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1993 after an attempt to restructure its debts failed, cut back and sold non-core assets during 1994, and emerged in February 1995. The 1996 Ciba and Hercules purchases followed, and in the same year, according to its timeline, Hexcel moved its headquarters from Pleasanton, California, to Stamford, Connecticut, where English Wikipedia still places it. Wikipedia says the shares have traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 1980 under the ticker HXL.

The most widely reported recent turn is a merger that did not happen. On 12 January 2020 Hexcel and the controls maker Woodward announced an all-stock merger of equals, as English Wikipedia’s Woodward article records, citing The Wall Street Journal. On 6 April 2020 the two companies said they had mutually agreed to end the agreement. Their joint release, published that day by Textile World, said the boards of both companies had approved the decision in response to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the aerospace and industrial sectors, that each company needed to focus on its own business, and that neither side would pay the other a termination fee. The two chief executives said they still hoped to collaborate on future platforms.

Leadership has changed since then. English Wikipedia says Tom Gentile was named chief executive on 1 May 2024, succeeding Nick Stanage, who had led the company during the Woodward talks. Hexcel’s website describes its purpose as lightweighting, and still tells its history through people and parts: the Berkeley founders, the honeycomb radomes, the Apollo footpads and the composite structures of modern airliners.

For a design guide, Hexcel shows how a materials supplier can build an identity around a single geometric idea, the hexagonal cell that gave it its name, and around customers’ aircraft rather than its own. Compare Woodward, its partner in the 2020 merger plan, and Airbus, the aircraft maker behind the A350 contract. For this guide we use carbon black, a warm weave grey and a resin amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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