U.S. Display Group (CONT’D FROM PAGE 1)
Greg Moore’s former vice president at Rock-Tenn, where Moore started his career in the corrugated industry, coin- cidentally, about 200 yards from the current U.S. Display Group facility in Tullahoma. By that time, Moore had been in Operations with Rock-Tenn in Tennessee and Texas and was working in Sales in Memphis, Tennessee, and they contacted Moore to see if he would be interested in coming home. That is when Moore got his career-chang- ing opportunity. Moore left his sales position at Rock-Tenn in Memphis and stepped into the role of plant manager of Eagle Displays in October of 1998. When Martin finally stepped out of the business in 2000, Greg Moore became the general manager. “This was around the time when I convinced our peo- ple that we needed to change the name of the company from Eagle Displays to Linpac Displays, if only to make the industry aware that we were part of a bigger organization,” says Moore. That was in 2001. The new Linpac Displays, however, had the same “foot- print” and the same outdated equipment the company had been using since the Eagle Displays years, including a lot of machinery that was still being hand-fed. Upgrades were sorely needed. The company’s stock in trade has always been, as it is now, displays, and according to Moore, it did a great job with the machinery it had and made quality products, but it lacked processes. Also, the company nev- er had a flexo folder gluer and had never run brown boxes,
An Independent’s Vision Like most other independent display manufacturers and sheet plants who found success in the corrugated in- dustry, the company was born from humble beginnings. Wayne Martin started Eagle Displays from scratch with the “bare bones” of converting equipment and carved a niche in the burgeoning display marketplace. Due to a non-com- pete agreement with a previous employer, Martin had to go at least 120 miles away from Franklin, KY to start his business. He discovered that Tullahoma, Tennessee, was one of a handful of locations just outside the non-compete radius and it “checked all the boxes:” it was a small town of approximately 15,000 that boasted a good labor force, it had business-friendly city officials who were willing to support a display manufacturing plant, and it had fast and ready access to major interstates, making it a great place to run a business. Martin found a building and operated a profitable inde- pendent display operation until January of 1998, when he sold it to UK based packaging giant Linpac, which a few years prior had begun a corrugated business in the United States and which had in a short time rapidly grown its port- folio to seven paper or containerboard converting facilities and a paper mill. (To learn more about The Linpac Legacy, see the December 16th and 23rd, 2024, issues of BCN.) Eagle’s sales manager at the time happened to be
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October 20, 2025
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