Encore Wire Brand Guidelines: The McKinney Building-Wire Campus Prysmian Bought in 2024

Two wire veterans and a former mobile-home plant.

Encore Wire was founded in April 1989 in McKinney, Texas, about 35 miles north of Dallas, by Vincent A. Rego and Donald M. Spurgin. The International Directory of Company Histories says the two had worked together in the wire business since the 1950s. Rego became plant manager of Narragansett Wire when it opened in Plano, Texas, in 1953; the pair later ran Capital Wire and Cable, which they took public in 1964 and which became part of U.S. Industries in 1968. Rego then formed a new company, Capital Wire, which was sold to the Penn Central Corporation in August 1988.

Rego wanted an “encore,” the same history says. With new investors, he became chairman of the new company and Spurgin its president and chief executive. They bought a former mobile-home plant on a 12-acre site in north-east McKinney and started with eight employees, spending the first months installing and testing equipment; the company’s own history describes the start as a 68,000-square-foot industrial warehouse. The first products were residential cables — NM cable for interior wiring and UF underground feeder cable — and the first shipments went out in February 1990.

Encore Wire went public in 1992, listing on Nasdaq under the ticker WIRE, and moved into commercial building wire in 1994 with a second plant making THHN cable. Spurgin retired in 1996 and Rego took on the chief executive’s role as well. In 2006 Daniel L. Jones, whom the International Directory of Company Histories describes as groomed for the job by Rego over several years, became chief executive; the company later described him as chairman, president and CEO from 2006 to 2024.

Colour-coded wire, reels and one campus.

Encore Wire built its business on one site. Through the 1990s it added a distribution centre in 1997, a copper rod mill in 1998 and a plastics mill in 1999 to make its own sheathing, along with a railroad spur, the International Directory of Company Histories says; the rod mill also let it reprocess copper scrap. The company’s own timeline continues with a third plant for circuit wire in 2001, armored cable in 2006, industrial cable in 2008, the Encore TechLab research centre in 2010, which the company describes as LEED Platinum certified, and aluminum building wire in 2012. In 2023 it added a cross-linked polyethylene compounding facility for wire insulation, and it now describes a campus of 460 acres with more than 3.5 million square feet under roof.

Its signature idea is colour. According to the International Directory of Company Histories, the product grew out of a meeting in Columbus, Ohio, in the mid-1990s, where Rego and Dan Jones heard electrical inspectors, maintenance engineers and contractors describe the cost of marking cables by hand with coloured tape. Encore developed coloured feeder cable, introduced it for the commercial market in 1999 and for the residential market in December 2001, then extended the idea to its non-metallic cable. The trade publication EC&M/CEE News named the colour-coded wire a product of the year in 2002, the same source says. Encore Wire itself says it “pioneered” coloured wire and cable for the commercial market in 1999.

Packaging is the other half of the story. The company’s range includes the Reel Payoff, which it calls the industry’s first self-spinning wooden reel, the compartmentalised Reel Deal, the Cyclone Barrel Pack and the Mega Coil, which it says is designed for prefabrication work. Its 35th-anniversary timeline also lists the introduction of its SuperSlick Elite line in 2009.

Wire, cable and connectors.

Wire, cable and connector makers sell parts that disappear once they are installed, so their pictures tend to show the moment before that happens. Yards stacked with wooden cable drums, reels of insulated conductor and coils of copper set the scale of a cable business; close-ups of gold-plated contacts, crimped terminals and push-pull plugs show the precision of a connector maker. Bundles of colour-coded wires, laid out on a harness board, explain more about the trade than any slogan.

The customers shape the imagery. Many of these companies supply aircraft, rail vehicles, cars, factories and communications networks, and their brochures return again and again to the same scenes: a wiring harness threaded through an airframe, a connector on a train bogie, a cabinet of fibre-optic cable in a data centre. The product is rarely the hero on its own; it appears in the machine it serves.

Much of the industry’s public life happens at trade fairs. electronica, the electronics trade fair, is where component makers show connectors, sensors and assemblies to engineers and buyers, and Wire Düsseldorf gathers the makers of wire, cable and the machines that produce them. Stands are often built around cut-away samples, test rigs and walls of plugs in every size.

The names themselves reflect a long history of mergers. Several of the companies in this guide carry coined names, initials or the names of founders whose businesses were later bought and combined, and the same plug may be sold under a brand that has changed owner more than once. This guide sets out who founded each company, who owns it now and what it says about where its products are made, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Prysmian brand since July 2024.

Encore Wire stayed independent and listed for 35 years. In July 2024 the Italian cable group Prysmian completed its acquisition of the company, according to both Encore Wire and T&D World. The company now presents itself as “Encore Wire, a Prysmian Brand,” still based in McKinney, and says its products are “proudly made in America” at its “vertically integrated, Texas campus.” Through Prysmian’s North American business, its distributors also gained access to Prysmian products such as medium-voltage cable and Carol-brand portable cord, the company says.

Investment in McKinney has continued under the new owner. The company’s timeline records a new residential plant of 340,800 square feet in 2024, with four 71-foot silos, and a groundbreaking in 2025 for a medium-voltage cable facility of more than 650,000 square feet. In April 2026 T&D World reported that Prysmian had opened its expanded Copper Building Wire Plant and Service Center in McKinney, describing Encore Wire’s focus as copper and aluminum electrical building cables and wires. The same report described its scrap purchase program, through which Encore Wire buys insulated wire and bare copper from customers to be reclaimed on a recycling line.

For a design guide, Encore Wire shows how a building-wire maker can be branded through colour, packaging and a single place of manufacture. Compare Prysmian, its owner since 2024, and Nexans, the French cable group. For this guide we use a drawn copper with a reel navy and a warehouse grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Encore Wire’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.