Molex Brand Guidelines: A 1938 Plastic Named for Its Mold, Now a Koch Connector Maker

A plastic made from two waste piles.

Molex began in 1938 as a material, not a connector. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on the company, says the engineer Frederick A. Krehbiel, then in his late sixties, formed the Molex Products Company with his son Edwin in Brookfield, Illinois, to use a plastic he had devised. English Wikipedia describes the recipe as asbestos tailings and coal tar pitch combined with limestone. Both were waste piles Krehbiel had seen on earlier engineering jobs, the directory says, and he named the result by taking “mol” from its molded state and adding “ex,” which he felt sounded modern.

The first products were domestic. The new company pressed flowerpots from the material, and English Wikipedia adds salt shakers to the early list. Another son, John H. Krehbiel, who had run his own insulation business, joined in 1940.

The war years shaped what came next. During the Second World War the War Production Board put established molding materials such as Bakelite and polystyrene on restricted lists, the directory says, and Molex was not on those lists. The family first offered the material to the government for military use, which was not taken up, and instead used it for consumer goods that could no longer be made from the restricted plastics: toy submarines and toy pistols, salt dispensers for the Morton Salt Company and clock cases. After the war the limestone in the recipe was replaced with fiberglass, which made the material stronger and more flexible.

John Krehbiel had taken control by the late 1940s, while Edwin, trained as an artist, designed the molds and tooling. The directory says the first product of the new direction was a molded terminal block for General Electric’s Hotpoint range, followed by parts for Maytag, Whirlpool and Westinghouse. The appliance market gave the young company its first large customer base.

From flowerpots to plugs and sockets.

The move from material to connector came in 1960, when Molex launched its first nylon plug and receptacle line, according to the directory, which describes it as the end of Molex the material and the start of Molex the connector company. Pin-and-socket connectors designed by John Krehbiel went into color television sets for Zenith, RCA and Magnavox. The headquarters moved from Brookfield to Downers Grove in 1964.

Overseas growth started with a family decision. In 1967 John’s younger son, Frederick Krehbiel II, was put in charge of a new international division and went to Japan, where early orders came from Matsushita. Because Japanese customers wanted local supply, the company’s first plant outside the United States opened in Yamato, Japan, in 1970, followed by a plant in Ireland in 1971. The directory notes that Molex went to Japan first, rather than through Canada and Europe, and took from it a lesson about “being local” in each region.

In 1972 the company went public, incorporated as Molex Incorporated and moved its headquarters to Lisle, Illinois, where it remains. Under John H. Krehbiel Jr., president from 1975, and Fred Krehbiel, chief executive from 1988, Molex shifted from home entertainment and appliances toward business machines and computers. English Wikipedia says the company’s name became attached to a type of power connector used in personal computers, the “Molex connector.” In 1999 the company bought Cardell, a maker of automotive connectors, and named J. Joseph King its first president from outside the family, the directory says. English Wikipedia describes Woodhead Industries, bought in 2006, as the largest acquisition in Molex’s history at that time.

Connectors as a design language.

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 Koch company since 2013.

The family era ended in 2013. That September Koch Industries agreed to buy Molex, Forbes reported on 12 September 2013, closing the Krehbiel family’s 75-year involvement; the decision to sell was made by the founder’s grandsons, Frederick and John Krehbiel. English Wikipedia says Koch kept the Molex name and the Lisle headquarters and runs the business as a subsidiary, and Koch’s own site calls Molex “a Koch company.”

Under Koch, Molex widened into medical work. In November 2016 it bought Phillips Medisize, a Wisconsin maker of drug delivery devices and other medical products, English Wikipedia says, and Koch describes Phillips Medisize as “a Molex company” working as a contract development and manufacturing organization. The largest step came in 2026: on 1 April, Electronics Weekly reported, Molex completed its purchase of Smiths Interconnect from the British Smiths Group, adding ruggedized custom connectors, contacts, RF components and optical transceivers for harsh environments, as well as semiconductor test capabilities. Molex called it the largest acquisition in its history and said its footprint now ran to more than 90 plants in 22 countries.

Koch lists the markets Molex serves today as data centers, industrial automation, medical devices, vehicles and consumer technology, alongside aerospace and defense. Through all of it the company has kept the name of a 1938 plastic that it stopped making decades ago.

For a design guide, Molex shows how a name coined for a material can outlast that material and carry a global connector business. Compare TE Connectivity and Amphenol, two other connector makers. For this guide we use a deep navy, a warm ivory and a copper brown with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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