Exterior view of the three-story glass curtain wall atrium at CORE autosport in Rock Hill, SC, installed by Rock Hill Glass Co.

Chris Maddox (left) is the Owner and President of Rock Hill Glass Co. and Devin Maddox (right) is the Vice President of Rock Hill Glass Co.

Rock Hill Glass Co. in Rock Hill, South Carolina, will do anything from cutting and polishing a $6 piece of glass for a mirror to a half-million-dollar job fabricating and installing glass curtain walls in multistory buildings, says Owner and President Chris Maddox. The only thing the full-service glass shop won’t handle is auto glass.

Seventy percent of the company’s business is commercial projects, but “we also do walk-in business for people that come in here and want a piece of glass for a window or a picture frame,” Chris says. That includes glass tabletops, mirrors and shower doors. “We do a lot of residential glass replacement for glass that gets fogged or broken.”

The company’s work falls into three categories: walk-in business, residential service and commercial contract work. But most of its work is repeat business for contractors with whom they have long-term relationships. “We’ve got a nucleus of contractors that we pretty much do all of their work. We try to keep them really happy,” Chris says.

But Rock Hill Glass Co. still cares about the small customers as well. “Many glass companies have gotten out of the residential work or the walk-in business because it is not a huge volume and you’re not getting rich off it, Chris says. “But we feel an obligation to do that work, because people need it. Someone may come in here with a framed mirror from their home. They broke the mirror and they want to get it repaired—where are they going to go? It may not be but a $20 or $30 sale to us, but it makes somebody happy.”

With 16 full-time employees, the majority of Rock Hill Glass Co.’s work is done within a 50-mile radius of its office. “But we do travel,” Chris says. “We do work in Charleston, Savannah, Greenville—wherever the contractors that we work with are working. If they are doing a job 200-300 miles away, we will go there.” For larger projects, the company uses subcontractors. “So any given week we can have 10-20 subcontractors working on a job as well.”

Chris, 62, runs the family business along with his son, Devin Maddox, 39, who is Vice President and handles much of the project management. Chris says that when he retires, he’d like to pass the business on to Devin. “I have nicknamed him ‘my retirement.’ ”

Building Glass Walls

The commercial contract work includes everything from glass curtain walls to storefront windows, to glass doors, interior glasswork, glass office partitions, conference room tabletops and glass shelving, Chris says.

Rock Hill Glass Co. also does a lot of institutional work. “We’ve done hospitals in the last couple of years, plus schools, commercial buildings, storefronts. We do new construction as well as remodels, upfits and repair work,” Chris says. “We will go out to repair a storefront door if that is what someone needs, or if they just want to put a new door in, we will do that as well.”

One project that both Chris and Devin are particularly proud of is the state-of-the-art 30,000 square-foot headquarters of CORE autosport in Rock Hill. The building that opened in 2012 is three floors and features expansive glass. “It’s one of the nicest projects we have ever done,” Devin says. “It’s a really neat looking building. It’s got that nice atrium in the front, the staircase, and that is all curtain wall.”

Commercial windows, for the most part, are either storefront or curtain wall. Storefront is what you see most of the time in retail buildings, the large windows that are similar to residential picture windows. Storefront isn’t structural whereas curtain wall is, he says. Once commercial windows reach a certain height you have to step up to a curtain wall, Devin says. “Storefront windows are really like a one-part system. We build the frames here in the shop and take them out to the job and just kind of snap them together and set them in place,” he says.

Curtain wall, on the other hand, has to be built on the project. “You can’t prefab the windows. It’s more like what I would call a three-part window. You have a back member that you put in first, you put the glass in, and then you have a pressure bar that screws on and a face cap that makes it look pretty on the outside. Once you start seeing these two-story, three-story, 20-story-tall buildings that are just glass, that is curtain wall.”

Among its institutional projects, Rock Hill Glass Co. worked on two identical, three-story buildings for the Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The glass installation was “all curtain wall. Even the smaller windows were curtain wall because they wanted everything to match,” Devin says.

Everything that Rock Hill Glass Co. does is custom work. “Everything that we do we fabricate in our shop,” Chris says.

And business has been booming. “2020 was the biggest year we’ve ever had in the 21 years I’ve owned the business,” Chris says, “and not by just a little. It was the biggest year we’ve had by quite a bit.” He attributes much of that to the booming construction in the high growth Charlotte metro area, which Rock Hill is part of.

The COVID-19 pandemic also added to the company’s growth. “We did do a lot of partition work. We were buying as much PLEXIGLAS and Lexan as we could find. It was just flying out of here as quick as we were bringing it in,” he says.

New Facility Adds Needed Space

To keep up with its growth, Rock Hill Glass Co. moved to the Rock Hill Airport Industrial Park on June 1, 2021, going from a 7,200-square-foot building to a 14,500-square-foot space. “We sold the building that I had for 20 years,” Chris says. “We just outgrew it.” The area where the old building was located is growing and the value had shot up, “so we sold the property. It just didn’t make sense to add on at that location with prices going where they were,“ he says. “We were busting at the seams. It is sort of amazing. We culled out a lot of things as were moving, but we still filled up this new space. That is how packed we were in the other warehouse.”

Devin says they are “working a lot safer in the new building.” The area where they cut and polish glass and the area where they do aluminum fabrication for frames were on top of each other in the old facility, he says. “They had no space between each other. Now, one is on one side of the building and the other is on the opposite side. And, we can keep a lot more inside. In our old building, we had to store some materials outside.”

Background in Glass Business

Chris bought Rock Hill Glass Co. in 2000 from Ray Alewine, who had founded it in 1995. Chris had started in the glass business in the manufacturing and supply end in 1976 while he was in high school. Until 2000, he was working for the large glass manufacturers that supply shops like Rock Hill Glass Co.

A native of Marietta, Georgia, Chris had been general manager for a couple of manufacturing facilities around the country. In 1999, when the company he was working for as general manager in Charlotte was sold, he decided it was time to do something new. “I was about to have to move again while my children were in high school. That’s when a friend of mine, Ray Alewine, asked if I wanted to buy Rock Hill Glass. I had never worked in this end of the business, but I was around it for so long that I felt comfortable with it. Ray was in his mid-60s, and he was ready to retire. So we put a deal together.”

Devin began to learn the business working part time while in high school and during summer breaks. He had intended to just earn money for college, but surgery during his second year of college for a congenital heart defect changed his outlook. “Once I recovered, I never went back to school. I just started working full time. I enjoyed the business,” Devin says. “I’ve been around it since I was 12 or 13 years old, even in the distribution end of it, working in the shop, cleaning up, things like that. I guess it just kind of came natural to me. I enjoy it. Honestly, I don’t know what else I would do. I don’t come in hating my job and wish I were off doing something else.”

As to the future, “I always hope to keep growing, work smart and keep a reputable name. That is the biggest thing with me,” Devin says. “One thing I want people to realize is that our goal is to make our customers happy,” adds Chris. “And we take a lot of pride in that. If we ever run into a problem, we will do everything we can to fix it.” And that’s a promise that won’t be broken.