A Mobile manufacturer whose roots reach back to 1877 has adopted a single name for the first time in its modern history. Environmental Textile Products, the specialty fabric company known for most of the past four decades as Engineered Textile Fabrics, has launched a unified brand identity and a new website that pull five separate business lines under one banner.
The company began on the Gulf Coast as Brown & Brown, a fabric and textile business founded in 1877. It became Engineered Textile Fabrics in 1980 and has since expanded well past its origins in cut-and-sew work into environmental containment systems, industrial fabric solutions, commercial awnings, competitive track and field, and a division called Racemarks. The rebrand is the first time all five have carried a common identity.
“This company has been in our family for five generations, and in that time, we’ve expanded into markets and capabilities that go well beyond where we started,” said Ken Robinson, owner of Environmental Textile Products. “The new name and brand reflect everything we do and everything we’ve built. We want our customers — both those who have been with us for decades and those finding us for the first time — to see the full picture of who ETP is.”
Three Names, One Company
The renaming is the third identity a single business has carried across roughly a century and a half, and each name reflects what the company was doing at the time.
Brown & Brown was a 19th-century fabric and textile operation. Engineered Textile Fabrics, adopted in 1980, signaled a shift toward technical, performance-driven fabric work rather than general textile trade. Environmental Textile Products reflects the direction the business has taken since — most visibly toward containment and environmental systems, but with a portfolio broad enough that no single market defines it.
Rebranding a company this old carries a specific risk, and it is one the company’s own framing acknowledges. Longevity is an asset in industrial supply. Customers who have bought from a manufacturer for decades trust the name on the invoice, and changing that name can create uncertainty at exactly the accounts a company least wants to unsettle. Robinson’s remarks address that directly, aiming the new identity at both longtime customers and new ones.
What the company is arguing is that the old names had come to understate it. A buyer who knew Engineered Textile Fabrics for one product line had no particular reason to learn that the same firm also made awnings, or supplied track and field, or fabricated pond liners. Consolidating five divisions under one brand is an attempt to make the company legible to its own customers.
The Five Divisions
ETP now organizes itself around five named divisions:
- Environmental & Containment — engineered barrier and containment products for wastewater and environmental systems, including geomembranes and floating baffles.
- Industrial — industrial fabric solutions, including custom industrial curtains and other large-format fabricated goods.
- ArtCraft Awnings — commercial awnings.
- ETP Sports — a specialized brand serving competitive track and field at the high school, collegiate and elite levels.
- Racemarks — a fifth division whose products, along with those of ETP Sports, are now available through e-commerce on the company’s new site.
All five, according to the company, design and manufacture their products in the United States.
What Geomembranes and Floating Baffles Do
Two of the products the company highlights are unfamiliar outside the industries that buy them, and they are worth explaining, because they are the backbone of the environmental side of the business.
A geomembrane is an engineered synthetic liner — essentially a very large, very tough impermeable sheet — used to keep liquids where they belong. Geomembranes line landfill cells so that leachate cannot reach groundwater, and they cap closed landfills so that rainwater cannot get in. They line wastewater lagoons, industrial process ponds, mine tailings impoundments, irrigation reservoirs and canals. They form secondary containment inside berms around fuel and chemical tanks, so that a tank failure produces a contained spill rather than a groundwater problem. Panels are typically fabricated to a site’s dimensions and seamed, often by heat welding, into a continuous barrier.
Because the material is doing a regulatory job as much as a physical one — many of these applications exist because environmental permits require them — geomembrane work is exacting. Thickness, material chemistry, ultraviolet resistance, puncture resistance and seam integrity all matter, and the specifications are frequently written into a permit.
A floating baffle solves a subtler problem. In a wastewater treatment lagoon or a stormwater pond, water is supposed to spend a defined amount of time in the basin so that solids settle and biological treatment can occur. In practice, water entering at an inlet often travels more or less directly to the outlet, a phenomenon called short-circuiting. The water leaves before it has been adequately treated, while other parts of the pond sit relatively stagnant.
Baffles are fabric curtains suspended vertically in the water, held at the surface by a flotation collar, weighted or ballasted along the bottom, and anchored to the banks. They partition the basin and force the water to travel a longer, serpentine path from inlet to outlet. The result is a longer effective detention time and better treatment performance, often without any change to the basin itself. Similar fabric curtains are used for turbidity control, containing suspended sediment during in-water construction.
Both products share a characteristic that shapes how they are manufactured: they are rarely standard. Every lagoon, pond and landfill cell has its own dimensions, its own slopes and its own inlet and outlet geometry.
Awnings, Curtains and the Case for Made-to-Order
The same logic runs through the rest of the portfolio. Commercial awnings are dimensioned to a specific storefront, engineered for local wind loads and often shaped to a building’s architecture. Industrial curtains — heavy fabric partitions installed inside plants and warehouses — are cut to the bay they divide. They are used to separate conditioned from unconditioned space, to contain dust or paint overspray, to block welding flash, to isolate noisy operations, and to create temporary enclosures during renovation work in an operating facility.
ETP describes its core strength as delivering highly customized, made-to-order solutions that off-the-shelf or overseas suppliers cannot replicate. That is a specific competitive claim, and in fabricated goods it is a familiar and defensible one.
Commodity textile manufacturing has largely moved offshore, and it did so because standardized products in long production runs favor low labor cost above nearly everything else. Custom fabrication behaves differently. When every order is a different size, when the specification comes from an engineer’s drawing, when the lead time is measured in weeks and a mistake means a job site sits idle, the advantages shift toward proximity, communication and the ability to change something quickly. A shipping container of the wrong-size liner from the other side of the world is a much larger problem than a mis-cut panel from a plant a state away.
The company also points to long-tenured employees and deep technical knowledge as part of its reputation. That, too, tracks with the nature of the work. Fabricating and seaming heavy technical fabric to engineered tolerances is a skilled trade, and the knowledge tends to live in the people doing it rather than in a manual.
Manufacturing in Mobile
A fabric manufacturer with roots in 1870s Mobile fits the city’s economic history more neatly than it might first appear.
Mobile has been a working port for three centuries, and port cities have always supported the trades that serve ships and the cargo moving through them. Canvas work — sails, tarpaulins, covers, bagging and awnings — was a standard part of that ecosystem in the age of sail and well beyond it. Mobile in 1877 was a cotton port emerging from the economic wreckage of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and cotton textiles were the material of the age.
The city’s industrial base broadened over the following century. Timber and lumber moved through the port in volume. Shipbuilding expanded enormously during the Second World War and left behind a skilled industrial workforce. Paper, chemical and petrochemical plants located along the Mobile River and Mobile Bay. In more recent decades, aerospace and shipbuilding have anchored the region’s manufacturing employment, with major operations at the Port of Mobile and at Brookley.
What is unusual about ETP is not that it is a Mobile manufacturer. It is the continuity — a single family business that has been operating through all of it, adapting from one era’s materials and markets to the next.
The New Website
The rebrand’s practical centerpiece is a new website, which the company describes as the central hub of the unified brand. It includes dedicated pages for each of the five divisions, integrated e-commerce for ETP Sports and Racemarks products, and streamlined quote-request capability for custom and large-format industrial work.
That split — transactional e-commerce on one side, quote requests on the other — reflects the reality of a company selling into very different markets. Track and field products can be specified, priced and bought online. A geomembrane installation or a run of custom industrial curtains cannot; those begin with dimensions, drawings and a conversation. Building both paths into one site is the digital equivalent of what the rebrand is trying to do organizationally.
What Comes Next
The company frames the new identity as a foundation rather than a finish line. ETP says it is approaching its 150th anniversary, and the Robinson family has tied the rebrand to continuity as much as change — quality materials, skilled American craftsmanship and long-term customer relationships, presented as the constants that carried the business from Brown & Brown to Engineered Textile Fabrics to Environmental Textile Products.
For customers, the immediate change is mostly a matter of names and navigation. The divisions, the products and the manufacturing are the same; what has changed is that they now sit under one identity and one website. For a company that has spent nearly a century and a half quietly making things to order on the Gulf Coast, the point of the exercise appears to be simple visibility — making sure the people who buy from one part of ETP know the rest of it exists.