A human brain sits in a jar on the desk of Robert W. Flesher, president of Apogee Designs Ltd.
"It's almost a test," Mr. Flesher said about people's reaction to the floating mass of gray matter in his unassuming office. "I can tell whether you are a little more open."
The brain as a paperweight is symbolic of the unconventional, laid-back attitude at 14-year-old Apogee, which designs and makes a variety of plastic items ranging from trash can lids to cutting-edge biotechnology equipment.
But Apogee's real products are ideas and solutions.
"We want to provide solutions to people," said Mr. Flesher, the majority shareholder of the privately held company. "We're a company full of mavericks."
Located in a former cardboard box plant in the bowels of South Baltimore's industrial area, the 47-person operation, with $4.1 million in annual sales, is a cross between a state-of-the art manufacturing operation and a collection of young smart alecks convinced that they can find answers to any problem. They often do.
Mr. Flesher attributes the success of the company, which he said has been consistently profitable, to the constant exchange of ideas and teamwork. "There's a lot of great people," he said. "They are the ones who build it."
The 40-year-old Mr. Flesher, who left the University of Maryland in 1976 -- 20 credit-hours shy of a degree -- has had an entrepreneurial flair since he was a teen-ager, when he turned cast-off MG car insignias into key fobs and sold them for $2 each.
But the burning passion of the Towson native has been designing and making products. He has a fully- quipped garage workshop at his Dulaney Valley home and is known to take his portable computer to bed to keep working on design problems.
"Pretty much when he is awake his mind is thinking of design and utilization," said Rae Ann McInnis, his wife of six years. "I think that's pretty much how his mind sees the world."
The company's big break came in 1980, when a salesman came to Mr. Flesher with a collection of parts for a device he was trying to sell to a Bethesda medical supply company. The salesman asked Mr. Flesher to assemble it.
The problem was, he didn't know what the device was.
"I was told it was a blood analyzer," Mr. Flesher said. "It's like saying it's a spacecraft. It had absolutely nothing to do with the unit."
The salesman figured that Mr. Flesher's company, which was then making custom plastic products for speciality shops, could handle the job since it was involved in plastic.
But when Mr. Flesher started putting the device together one weekend, pre-stressed plastic parts blew apart when glue was applied.
"Here was my chance at glory and it was gone," Mr. Flesher said about his reaction at the time.
But instead of giving up, he built a new device over the weekend using another machine as a model. "It was a completely different design, different color, different everything," he said.
As it turned out, the device was an electro phoresis unit, which analyzes various substances by using an electric charge and a gelatin material that acts as a molecular sieve.
The company the device was built for -- Bethesda Research Laboratories Inc. -- was so impressed with Mr. Flesher's new design that it started ordering the machines from Apogee. Sales of electro-phoresis equipment now account for much of Apogee's revenues. Its largest customer is Life Technologies Inc. of Bethesda -- the successor company to Bethesda Research.
"They are top drawer when it comes to crunching out the product of their creative juices," said R. William Lynn, whose experience with Apogee dates to 1980 when he was an executive at Bethesda Research.
Apogee was picked by Bethesda Research because of its ability not only to design new devices but then to turn around and make them in its own production facility, Mr. Lynn said.
"They have an awful lot of fun," he said about the Apogee style. "They are very freewheeling in their thinking."
With electro-phoresis as its base, Apogee has branched into an eclectic mix of products ranging from trash can lids made for Rubbermaid Inc. to a device that mimics the operation of the body for the purpose of growing cells.
In all, the company has 150 different customers and produces 80 different products at any one time in its large production area, which is filled with lines of tables stacked with gleaming plastic parts.
The heart of the production area is a massive plastic vacuforming machine, which shapes sheets of plastic into the desired parts.
One of its recent solutions was a curvy plastic cover that protects the fenders of minivans being built at the General Motors Corp. assembly plant on Broening Highway. Backed by soft rubber that hugs the side of the vehicles, the guards protect the front fenders from nicks and scratches as assembly line workers work in the engine compartment.
Like many of the company's projects, the GM business came from a chance discussion. In this case, Mr. Flesher was talking with a broker who happened to know about this problem at the plant. Mr. Flesher's company came up with a solution and has sold 1,100 pairs of the shields to the plant, with each set costing less than $100.
Adhering to a policy of not commenting on suppliers, a GM spokes woman would neither confirm nor deny that Apogee was a supplier for the Broening Highway plant.
With auto assembly plants as its target, Apogee hopes to develop devices that also would eliminate the time-consuming task of putting masking tape over all chrome parts of a car before it is painted.
One of these devices is simplicity itself -- a blank key with a clear plastic collar that fits into a key hole, protecting the chrome around it.
The history of many of Apogee's products often is a series of happy coincidences.
For example, three years ago, Mr. Flesher became increasingly irritated with having to tie and untie the black-leather cover that protected the front of his Porsche. To solve the problem, he came up with MagBra -- a magnetic sheet of plastic that attaches to the car. The devices are now sold through car magazines for $95 each.
"I like making things," Mr. Flesher said. "That's what I do 24 hours a day. . . . That's what gives me joy in life."