About Us

Slipmate began in 1953 when John Matecki left his job as a spray coating technical advisor for DuPont to form his own company. He began in a 3,500 sq ft facility in Franklin Park, Illinois providing Teflon™ finishes for Military, Aerospace, Food Service, Automotive, Medical and Industrial customers throughout the United States.

Due to the lack of available high temperature cure ovens required to cure Teflon™, John designs and builds the first batch oven for Slipmate.

In the 1960s, Slipmate expanded its business internationally, became a charter member of the DuPont Licensed Industrial Applicator program, was reorganized as a corporation and tripled its Franklin Park facility to 12,500 sq ft to keep up with the increasing demand for cookware and other cooking products.

Following this period of expansion, the 70s brought about Slipmate seeing its products being used at McDonalds restaurants to make their Egg McMuffin.

The 80s brought around another period of explosive growth as Slipmate began EMI-RFI shielding applications for Motorola microphones for its public safety application. This lead Slipmate to becoming the preferred shielding applicator in the newly budding cell phone industry.

In 1984, Shieldmate was formed as a division of the Slipmate Company to focus on EMI-RFI shielding solely with John’s son, Mark, joining the company as a Sales Engineer. In 1986, Slipmate installs its first Fanuc robot for high volume shielding application and began shielding for the Motorola Microtac, which is the first flip handset on the market. Then, in 1989, Slipmate moves to a 50,000 sq ft facility in Itasca, Illinois and John’s eldest son, Steve, joins Slipmate as President.

The 90s continued this aggressive expansion era as Shieldmate Plastics was formed to enter the injection molding industry and equipped with state of the art, Engle, Netstal, and Husky injection molding equipment. This came with a doubling in size of the Itasca facility to 100,000 sq ft. During this time, Slipmate continued to expand its engineered coating offerings, staying on the cutting edge of new technologies from DuPont and Whitford.

In the late 90s, Shieldmate Plastics became an integrated supplier of EMI-RFI shielded plastic and assembled components to Motorola, Lucent, Qualcomm, Sony and Denso, assisting in the development of the first Motorola Star Tac cellular phones.

In 2000, Slipmate sold its Shieldmate Plastics division to Nolato AB Sweden and moved its coating operations to a smaller 33,000 sq ft facility in Elgin, Illinois, shifting its focus back solely to its engineered coatings business. Learning from the efficiencies that robotics provided in the injection molding field, Slipmate installed high volume Fanuc coating robots in its Elgin facility, along with 1,000F degree finishing ovens, and large volume ovens to enable processing of parts up to 30 feet in length.

Slipmate also began to utilize Halar, Kynar, PFA, and ETFE in corrosion and chemical resistance applications for major chemical processing companies and the offshore oil industry.

In 2012, Slipmate’s quality system became ISO 9001:2008 certified (and in 2016 ISO9001:2015), opening doors to many more medical, military, and aerospace coating opportunities.

Slipmate also installed cleanroom for highly cosmetic and medical application of coatings, automated overhead conveyor systems for fluidized bed applications, closed loop coating delivery systems, a 5-ton crane, and expanded its engineering staff incorporating AutoCAD, Inventor, and Solidworks into its automation and tooling design functions.

In March of 2021, right alongside a global pandemic, Slipmate began the move back to its 50,000 sq ft Itasca facility to accommodate increasing demand and the need for more automated robotic lines.

Slipmate continued to be on the cutting edge of new technologies and began applying Sol Gel “ceramic-like” coatings as a beta testing site for major OEMs looking to get ahead of the PFAS regulations coming in the future. This has brought another period of explosive growth to the company, requiring investment in its people as well as its equipment. Slipmate upgraded its quality system certification to AS9100D with ISO 9001:2015 and added itself to the US approved government contractors list with CAGE code 9N2V1.

As of 2026, Slipmate has 50,000 square feet of factory floor space filled with equipment and upwards of 50 employees working together to meet any and all of its customers needs.

Slipmate looks forward to serving you as well.