In 1956, Louis Gerson started a business in a small auto-repair garage in Dorchester, Massachusetts with one idea: build a machine that could make disposable paint strainers faster and better than anyone could make them by hand. That first line turned out about 40 strainers a minute. More importantly, it set the company's DNA: automate it, improve it, then improve it again.
His son Ron Gerson inherited both the company and the instinct. Ron is an engineer and a tinkerer at heart, the kind of owner who grew up around his father's machines and has never been happier than on the factory floor with one opened up in front of him, working out how to make it run faster and smarter.
Ron's defining move came in the late 1970s, when he pointed the family's gift for automation and filtration at a much harder problem: protecting people's lungs. By 1985, Gerson was producing filtering facepiece respirators in Middleborough, Massachusetts on high-speed equipment the company designed itself, using melt-blown filter media it makes in-house. Ron's name sits on Gerson patents ranging from a fold-flat respirator that opens into a cup to a method of using centrifugal force to pack filter canisters. Today the company holds more than 200 NIOSH, FDA and CE approvals across a full product line, from N95s to half-mask and full-face respirators.
For forty years it was quiet, essential work. Gerson’s customers were body shops, industrial safety suppliers and hardware stores, and almost no one outside those trades had ever heard of an N95 mask.
Then came 2020. Gerson was one of only a handful of major N95 manufacturers in the United States, and a 21-person company in southeastern Massachusetts suddenly had the whole country on the phone. More than a year’s worth of orders landed in a single month. Calls came in as many as 100 an hour, some from doctors asking for masks directly, and Ron told a reporter at the time how difficult it was to turn people away. The Middleborough plant was running all shifts around the clock. Because Gerson built its own machines and made its own filter media, it could deliver when the country needed it. Millions of Gerson respirators went to hospitals, nursing homes and first responders, and to federal agencies from Health and Human Services to the Secret Service.
Ron’s answer to all of it was to build. In the middle of the pandemic, Gerson committed to a new, fully automated line capable of producing 55 million individually wrapped N95s a year. It was running by March 2021.
Ron told WCVB’s “Made in Mass” that before the pandemic, when he explained to people what his company made, they had no idea what it was. “Now they know.”
Highland’s team got to know Ron during COVID, and we stayed close after the surge passed. What came next will sound familiar to anyone who has owned a business through a boom. Orders that had looked permanent slowed, the far larger global players were still there, and Ron had to work out what Gerson should look like on the other side. He promoted Jim Brennan to help run the company through that transition and leaned on Highland acting as a coach from the sidelines.
In time the conversation turned to the question every owner faces sooner or later. Ron could reinvest heavily in capacity, automation and new products to keep pace with competitors many times Gerson’s size. Or he could find an owner with the scale and capital to take the brand and the Middleborough plant further than a family balance sheet could. That is a hard thing to weigh when the company carries your father’s name. Ron weighed it with care, and he decided the best way to honor what his family had built was to find its next steward.
With Highland’s guidance, Ron chose Globus Group based in the UK with a growing US presence. Globus started out three decades ago supplying gloves to salmon farmers in Shetland and is still led by its founder, Haraldur Agustsson. It had been looking for exactly what Ron spent his career building: an American respirator maker with its own technology and its own plant. Globus plans to invest heavily into the Middleborough facility and in the Gerson team, and Ron will stay involved in product development, which means he gets to keep tinkering.
Louis Gerson started with one machine in a Dorchester garage. His son built a company that helped a nation breathe when it mattered most, and seventy years on it still runs on the principles Louis put in place. It was Highland’s honor to help Ron secure the exit, and the legacy, he has earned for his family, his team and the company that carries his father’s name.
