Bally Ribbon Mills

What Bally Ribbon Mills does

Bally Ribbon Mills (BRM) is a privately held, 100-year-old American manufacturer of highly specialized engineered woven narrow fabrics, tapes, webbing, and 3-D composite structures, headquartered and operating from a single facility in Bally, Pennsylvania. The company's core technology spans shuttle, needle, Jacquard, and specialty broadcloth looms, including proprietary 3-D continuous weaving that produces net-shape preforms and complex multi-layer textile structures from fibers such as nylon, polyester, aramid, carbon, graphite, glass, quartz, ceramic, and silicon carbide. Its Advanced Products Group designs custom 3-D woven joints, polar and spiral woven structures, and high-performance tapes for hybrid composite applications, while a separate ISO 14644 Class 8 clean room supports Class I-III medical textile production and the E-WEBBINGS® brand supplies conductive e-textiles for IoT and monitoring use cases.

BRM generates revenue primarily through project-based custom manufacturing, with quote-based pricing, a $100 minimum on stock items, and a 200-yard minimum on custom woven or dyed runs. Value-added services such as dyeing, finishing, sonic welding, and assembly supplement the core weaving revenue. The company sells directly to enterprise and government customers across aerospace, military/defense, medical devices, safety/protective equipment, industrial, and commercial/recreational verticals, with named relationships including NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Airbus, GE Engines, Safran, Eurocopter, GKN, the US Department of Defense, and the Air Force Research Laboratories. BRM maintains ISO 9001:2015, AS9100D, ISO 13485:2016, UL, and Berry Amendment compliance, and distributes globally through direct sales with technical engineering support, supplemented by trade show presence at JEC World, SHOT Show, CAMX, Techtextil, and the PIA Symposium.

Name

Bally Ribbon Mills

Legal name

Bally Ribbon Mills

Website

https://ballyribbon.com

Company type

Private

Founded year

1923

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

251–500 employees

Short description

Bally Ribbon Mills is a privately held Pennsylvania manufacturer founded in 1923 that designs and produces specialized engineered woven narrow fabrics, tapes, 3-D composite preforms, and medical textiles for aerospace, defense, medical, safety, and industrial customers.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Engineered Woven Narrow Fabrics

NAICS

Narrow Fabric Mills and Schiffli Machine Embroidery (31322), Broadwoven Fabric Mills (31321), Narrow Fabric Mills and Schiffli Machine Embroidery (313220)

SIC

Textile Mill Products (2200), Broadwoven Fabric Mills, Man Made Fiber & Silk (2221)

akta.pro primary industry

Narrow Fabrics & Webbings (Tapes/Ribbons/Straps) (IMAOABAD)

akta.pro secondary industries

Elastic, Tapes & Webbing Manufacturing (Elastic Bands/Binding/Strapping/Webbing) (IMAOALAD), Technical Fabric Mills (Performance/Protective/Medical Substrates) (IMAOABAH)

Keywords

• Engineered woven webbing
• Narrow fabric manufacturing
• 3-D woven composites
• Mil-Spec textiles
• Specialty industrial fabrics

Headquarters

HQ city

Bally

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Hardware or Manufacturing

Cost components

Personnel, Operations, Supply Chain, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales

Revenue model

1. Custom Woven Narrow Fabrics Manufacturing: Bally Ribbon Mills generates revenue through custom manufacturing of engineered narrow woven tapes, webbing, and specialty fabrics. The company produces over 2,000 different patterns for diverse applications including aerospace, military, medical, safety, commercial, and industrial uses. Revenue is generated through project-based custom orders with no minimum production quantities, supplemented by standard product offerings.
2. Value-Added Services: Additional revenue streams include post-weave processing services such as dyeing, finishing, strap cutting, hole punching, sonic welding, and minor assembly services. These services complement the core manufacturing business.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels2 records

Marketing channels5 records

Core offering

Bally Ribbon Mills designs, develops, and manufactures highly specialized engineered woven narrow fabrics including tapes, webbing, tubular textiles, 3-D composite structures, and specialty fabrics. The company produces over 2,000 different patterns using shuttle, needle, Jacquard, and specialty broadcloth looms, serving aerospace, defense, military, medical, safety, industrial, and commercial markets with custom-engineered solutions and value-added post-weave processing.

Product overview

Bally Ribbon Mills is a specialized manufacturer of engineered woven narrow fabrics offering a portfolio of products organized into core woven products (narrow tapes, webbing, tubular textiles, Mil-Spec/PIA-Spec webbing) and an Advanced Product Group for 3-D woven composites. The core products serve aerospace, safety, commercial, industrial, and medical markets, while the Advanced Product Group provides custom 3-D woven structures, joints, high-performance tapes, polar/spiral woven structures, and precision braiding for hybrid composite applications. The company also produces Medical Textiles for Class I-III medical devices and E-WEBBINGS® smart e-textiles for IoT applications. Products are manufactured in Pennsylvania using shuttle, needle, and Jacquard looms with over 2,000 different patterns.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• The Fabric of America®: A registered trademark tagline used to describe Bally Ribbon Mills' narrow woven tapes and webbing products manufactured in America.
• E-WEBBINGS®

Products and services

• Narrow Woven Tapes, Webbing, Tubular Textiles and Narrow Fabrics

Quantifiable outcome

• 2023 NASA Government Invention of the Year for 3DMAT Quartz Material developed with NASA for Orion spacecraft
• +1 more outcomes

Named customers12 records

Segments6 records

Ideal customer profiles6 records

Technology focussed No

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Feature6 records

Partnerships

Three partnerships are on record, tiered core.

• NASAcoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerBally Ribbon Mills collaborated with NASA to develop 3D Orthogonally-woven 3DMAT Quartz Material for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle compression pads. This partnership resulted in the 2023 NASA Government Invention of the Year award. BRM also developed woven narrow fabric reinforcement tensile structures for NASA's Mars rovers and collaborated on inflatable space habitat technologies with embedded fiber optic sensors.
• DuPontcoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerDuPont chose Bally Ribbon Mills to help in the development of aramid fibers known today as Kevlar and Nomex. Bally has worked with these high performance fibers since their inception and has been instrumental in incorporating them into high performance products.
• Air Force Research LaboratoriescoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerBRM supports Air Force Research Laboratories on advanced woven material development projects for aerospace applications.

Scale indicators3 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Broad incumbents

• Milliken & Company: Milliken is a large diversified textile manufacturer with specialty and performance fabrics divisions serving aerospace, automotive, industrial, and protective markets — a broad incumbent with comparable technical textile capabilities but a much wider portfolio.
• Albany International: Albany International is a large, publicly-traded engineered composites producer serving aerospace prime contractors with woven and 3-D preforms — overlapping with BRM's aerospace composites customer base but at materially greater scale and broader scope.
• Hexcel: Hexcel is a leading global aerospace composites supplier producing carbon fiber, woven reinforcements, and prepregs for Boeing, Airbus, and defense primes — a broader incumbent that competes with BRM at the advanced preform and composite material level.
• Glen Raven: Glen Raven is a technical textile manufacturer best known for Sunbrella, with significant industrial and protective fabric lines for safety, military, and specialty applications — comparable as an established U.S. specialty textile producer overlapping in industrial and safety segments.
• Toray Composite Materials America: Toray CMA is the U.S. arm of Toray Industries' carbon fiber and prepreg business supplying Boeing's 787 and other aerospace programs — a larger incumbent competing for the same aerospace composites wallet share as BRM's 3-D woven preforms.

Direct peers

• Web Industries: Web Industries is a U.S.-based contract manufacturer specializing in narrow fabrics, slitting, spooling, and custom textile converting for aerospace, medical, and industrial markets — directly comparable to BRM's narrow woven webbing and value-added converting services.
• BGF Industries: BGF Industries is a U.S. manufacturer of woven and nonwoven fiberglass, carbon, and aramid fabrics for aerospace, defense, and industrial composites — directly comparable to BRM's high-performance fiber weaving capabilities.
• Apex Mills: Apex Mills is a specialty knitter and woven fabric producer serving aerospace, military, medical, and industrial markets with technical textiles — closely comparable in customer mix and performance-fabric positioning to BRM.
• Carolina Narrow Fabric: Carolina Narrow Fabric is a long-established U.S. narrow fabrics mill producing woven tapes, webbing, and elastics for military, aerospace, safety, and industrial applications — a near-direct competitor to BRM's core webbing business.
• Saertex USA: Saertex is a global manufacturer of multiaxial non-crimp fabrics and 3-D near-net-shape preforms for aerospace, wind, and automotive composites — directly comparable to BRM's Advanced Products Group 3-D woven preform business.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat6 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/ballyribbon
• Facebookfacebook.com/BallyRibbonMills
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/bally-ribbon-mills

Compliance4 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Bally Ribbon Mills