A tale of how a small Louisville, Ky., business grew to be an industry-dominating global enterprise might seem something of a stretch.

But stretch is what it's all about at Lantech, which pioneered using plastic film to wrap multipackage shipments into a tightly bound unit, easily shipped on a wooden pallet.

Brothers Pat and Bill Lancaster developed the concept at a kitchen table using rubber bands to visualize how plastic film could be stretched around stacks of boxes. It was an almost immediate success.

"It was such a better mousetrap," said Pat Lancaster, company chairman. "That's how a company with no money can get started."

Today, Lantech has 420 employees, 60,000 machines in the field and annual revenues of about $110 million. The company has more than 175 patents in packaging machinery, holds the dominant share of stretch-wrap machinery sales in North America and has strong sales in Europe, Asia and Australia.

"They are the best and everybody knows them, and they recognize how important they are to the industry," said Mark Matthews, vice president of marketing for packaging for xpedx, a packaging equipment and supplies distributor. "They do things that are a lot more innovative than companies that are 10 times their size."

The packaging technology that Lantech invented can be seen in almost any warehouse or in big-volume retailers such as Sam's Club. Boxes, bags and other containers are "unitized" onto a pallet for shipment by truck. Instead of loading and unloading hundreds of boxes by hand, which would take hours, shippers forklift pallets of merchandise on and off in minutes.

About 80 percent of everything shipped arrives on a pallet. And of that, 90 percent is bundled by stretch wrap, said Jim Lancaster, CEO and son of Pat Lancaster, who turned over the company reins in 1995 and now concentrates on research and development. Bill Lancaster sold his share of the company in the early 1990s.

Before the Lancasters developed their technique, shippers worked with large shrink-wrap bags, which were heated to seal the plastic, Jim Lancaster said. Lantech was founded in 1972 with the goal of making and selling the ovens needed to heat shrink-wrap shipments.

But rising energy costs prompted the Lancasters to look for a different approach. With stretch wrap, the Lancasters discovered, the plastic would stick to itself — no heating required.

Also, the new method was cheaper and required less plastic. At the time, strapping cost $2 to $5 per load, and shrink bags cost $1.35 to $1.40.

Stretch wrapping, when it was introduced, could package a load for $1 or less. Today the cost ranges from about 25 cents to 35 cents per pallet load.

When the Lancasters made their discovery, shrink bags took more than 2 pounds of plastic wrap to encase a loaded pallet. The first stretch machines immediately reduced that amount by half.

The latest technology, introduced last year, can wrap a load of paper products with 3.5 ounces of film, and beverages with 4.5 ounces.

After Lantech introduced its products at a trade show, sales of its machines immediately took off. Business grew by 150 percent to 200 percent a year.

"For the next four years, our only problem was figuring out how to make them fast enough," Pat Lancaster said.

Lantech patented its stretch-wrap technique and competitors had to pay to use the technology. But in 1989, a court decision stunned the company by voiding its primary patent.

As royalty payments from other companies using the technology dried up, it became clear that production at Lantech's Louis-ville assembly plant was ailing and the company could lose out to competitors, Pat Lancaster said.

In response, the company switched to the "just-in-time" production methods pioneered by Toyota, which lowered costs and raised quality and delivery speed.

The improvements were dramatic, Pat Lancaster said.

Innovation, quality and efficiency are "what allow us to stay competitive" when many manufacturers are shipping their work to low-wage nations overseas, Jim Lancaster said. The company's fastest-growing markets are China and Southeast Asia, he said.