Moldex Brand Guidelines: The Culver City Mask and Earplug Maker Founded in 1980

A Culver City company that started with one product.

Moldex is the trading name of Moldex-Metric, Inc., a maker of disposable and reusable respirators and earplugs based in Culver City, California, on the west side of Los Angeles. The company dates its founding to 1980, and the Los Angeles Business Journal, reporting in October 2020, gave the same year and described it as a privately held manufacturer of hearing and respiratory protection equipment. The paper named Mark Magidson as the company’s founder and chief executive.

Its European arm tells the early story in more detail. Moldex Europe’s company history says the business began in California in 1980 making only dust masks, and that Moldex Europe followed five years later. It says that, working with the mining industry, it developed the first exhalation valve for an FFP mask, to make conditions underground easier, and that such valves have since become a market standard; that account is the company’s own. Earplugs followed in 1986. Moldex Europe says the hardest part was finding the right foam formula, one soft enough to roll down and stable enough to expand again at the right speed, and that its foam earplugs are free of PVC.

In 1994 the European range added reusable half masks with exchangeable filters, the Series 8000, whose mask body the company says is made entirely of a soft TPE material and is still sold today. By 1999 Moldex Europe had sales offices in Italy and Sweden alongside earlier ones in England, France, Spain and the Netherlands, plus a production site in the Czech Republic, which it says gave it a local presence in eight European countries. Its about page now speaks of more than 350 employees at eight locations in Europe who develop, make and sell its products to European standards.

Foam, mesh and a short list of products.

Moldex keeps a narrow range. The company says it is “specialized in an age of generalization,” and its US catalogue is built around two groups, plus eye protection. On the hearing side it lists disposable and reusable earplugs, dispensers, hearing bands and earmuffs; on the respiratory side, disposable respirators in the N, R and P filter classes, reusable facepieces, filters and cartridges. Named products include the contoured Meteors earplugs, the Rockets reusable earplugs with an air pocket in the tip, the Dura-Mesh shell used on its disposable masks and the 9000 Series full-face respirator, which the company says uses overmoulded construction to reduce weight and the number of parts.

Small, practical details recur in how the company describes itself. Its HandyStrap and SmartStrap masks are made to hang around the neck during a break rather than be thrown away, and it calls its PlugStations the first disposable earplug dispenser, which again is its own claim. It says it holds more than 70 patents and offers industrial masks in up to three sizes and healthcare masks in up to five, to fit a wider range of faces.

Design has been recognised in Europe. Moldex Europe says its WaveBand hearing band, with a curved shape meant to allow freer movement, was nominated for the German Design Award in 2009, and that its CompactMask received an iF product design award in 2013. In 2005 it opened a technology centre at Walddorfhäslach, near Stuttgart, where it says products are developed with 3D software and rapid prototyping, and where it designs, builds and programs its own production machines.

Materials are part of the brand story. The US company says all of its products and its packaging are free of PVC, that its literature and packaging use recycled paper, and that its respirator lockers and pocket packs can be recycled. At the A+A trade fair in 2019, Moldex Europe introduced reusable Air Seal FFP masks together with its own “Choose to reuse” logo, a small mark meant to encourage retailers and users to pick products that can be worn more than once.

A category built on fit and routine.

Gas detection and respiratory protection grew up underground. Before electronic sensors, miners carried canaries as an early warning of bad air; in 1937 Dräger’s first detector tube offered a chemical alternative, English Wikipedia notes, and the American company now called MSA Safety began in 1914 with an electric cap lamp for mines. In North America, mine-rescue crews are still known as “Drägermen,” a reminder of how closely the trade and its equipment makers have been tied to mining.

The equipment itself sets the visual tone of the category. A personal gas detector is a small, rugged housing clipped to a jacket, a harness or a helmet, with a display and a sensor opening facing outward. Breathing-apparatus sets combine a backplate, a compressed-air cylinder and a full-face mask, and appear most often in pictures of firefighters at work or in training. Fixed detectors are mounted on walls and pipework in plants, tunnels and refineries, where they are meant to be seen rather than hidden.

Many makers use bright housings in yellow, orange, red or black, colours that stand out against dirt, smoke and grey machinery, and pair them with plain sans-serif type and large figures on the display. Product pages tend to show the device in use in a hazardous setting, or as a clean cut-out against white, rather than as a lifestyle object. Test rooms, calibration stations and training galleries are part of the story too, since equipment of this kind is regularly checked and serviced.

Behind the products sit companies of very different ages and shapes: family-controlled groups, listed corporations and young technology firms, some with long histories that include the war years. For a designer, the category is a study in function first: legibility, contrast and durability, with brand colour used as a signal on the job.

Two continents, one narrow focus.

On manufacturing, Moldex says its core products are made in the USA, and that it has factories in the United States and Europe, sales offices and warehouses in its main markets and distribution in more than fifty countries. The 2020 pandemic tested that set-up. Moldex Europe says demand for FFP2 and FFP3 masks rose very sharply across Europe that year, and that because it makes so much in-house and produces in Europe, it built new lines and raised its FFP mask capacity by about half within a few weeks.

In the United States, the Los Angeles Business Journal reported in October 2020 that Moldex-Metric would set up an N95 respirator factory and a distribution centre on a site in Lebanon, Tennessee, with more than 200 jobs over three years, according to the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. The paper said the company then employed about 450 people in Los Angeles and quoted its marketing director saying that no jobs would be lost in Culver City. It also reported that federal Health and Human Services contracts for N95 masks had been awarded to the company that spring.

The company has also appeared in a legal dispute involving a competitor. According to English Wikipedia’s article on 3M, Moldex-Metric filed a whistleblower complaint against 3M under the False Claims Act in May 2016 concerning 3M’s Combat Arms earplugs, which had been supplied for US military use; in 2018 3M agreed to resolve the allegations with the US government without admitting liability.

The name needs care: Moldex Land and the wider Moldex Group in the Philippines, and Moldex Composites, a carbon-composites business, are separate and unrelated companies.

For a design guide, Moldex shows how a maker with a short product list builds a brand from named details — a foam formula, a mesh shell, a strap that hangs around the neck. Compare 3M, a far broader maker in the same category, and MSA Safety. For this guide we use a deep teal, a foam yellow and a pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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