Somewhere along the way, plastic product development became a logistical headache. A manufacturer with an idea has to go to one vendor for a prototype, another for the mould, a third for production, and sometimes a fourth to sort out the labelling and packing. Every handoff costs time, money, and somebody’s sanity. Mithun Madhukumar, Chief Strategy Officer at Thriam Toolroom, has been thinking about this problem for a while. His answer is straightforward: do everything in-house and stop making the customer run around. “We are a 360-degree plastic product manufacturing company,” he says. “From prototyping to mass production, all capabilities — 3D printing, mold manufacturing, compression molding, injection molding — are under one roof.” It sounds like a big claim. But Thriam has been building towards it for over three decades.
Roots in Compression Molding
The company was founded in 1989 by Mithun’s father, Madhukumar, a mechanical engineer who started with a 200-square-foot space in Mumbai and two machines. The early business was compression molding for OEMs — nothing flashy, just reliable work for the manufacturing sector. Over time, the space grew, the machines grew, and injection molding was added to the mix.
When Mithun joined in 2014, the company had a solid manufacturing base but was still, broadly speaking, a molding company. The vertical integration that defines Thriam today — adding 3D printing and in-house mold manufacturing capabilities — happened in the last three to four years, shaped largely by his push to build the full picture. “We already had molding as our core,” he explains. “So we added the pre and post capabilities around it. Now we have the entire chain. Prototype, mould, production, white-label manufacturing — complete.” The facility today is 20,000 square feet, located in Ahilya Nagar. The head office remains in Mumbai.
When the Army Walks In With Just an Idea
The range of what Thriam can actually take on is best illustrated not by a product catalogue but by a specific story. Not long ago, the Indian Army came to them with a requirement for bullet prototypes. There were no drawings, no design documentation, just an idea and a requirement. Thriam Toolroom handled the design, the drawings, the prototyping — everything. “They just came with an idea,” Mithun says. “So whether someone has a drawing or just an idea, we can take it to a product.”
That kind of capability does not come together quickly. It is built through years of investing in the right equipment and the right people. On the equipment side, Thriam runs EDM machines, wire-cut machines, VMCs, injection molding machines up to 300 tonnes, compression molding, and 3D printing. Mold manufacturing can handle tools up to 1 meter by 1 meter.
On the client side, the work speaks for itself. Thriam is a green channel supplier to Legrand, one of the world’s largest electrical infrastructure companies — meaning Legrand’s products go directly from Thriam’s facility into the market, with labeling, printing, and everything else taken care of. The company also exports to the US, UK, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia.
Educating Before Selling
One of the things that comes through clearly when Mithun talks about the business is that he sees a lot of his job as education. Many customers arrive with assumptions that cost them money before they have even started. “A customer will come in saying they want to buy a molding machine,” he says. “That is 50 to 60 lakh rupees locked up in a single asset. We sit with them and ask — do you actually need to do that? We have the capacity. Invest that money in developing the product instead.”
The same thinking applies to tooling decisions. Not every project needs a full mold immediately. Sometimes prototyping via 3D printing is enough to validate a design and save months of tooling time. Thriam’s job, as Mithun frames it, is to find the right path for the customer — not the most expensive one. “We are not running behind selling moulds,” he says plainly. “We are running behind solving the manufacturing problem properly.”
Returning to Die & Mould India After 15 Years
Thriam Toolroom has been a TAGMA member for a long time and Mithun has attended Die & Mould India as an audience member over the years. But the company is returning as an exhibitor after a 15-year gap, and the reason is simple — earlier, they did not have the full story to tell. Now they do.
“Since we now have this entire bandwidth in-house, it makes sense to come and show it,” he says. “We want to explain to customers how this integration actually works and how it saves them time, money, and the headache of managing multiple vendors.”
The stall will have around 12 to 14 people — a mix of technical and commercial — to handle the range of conversations that come in at an exhibition of this scale. Thriam also plans to share news of its next facility at the event: a plant in Bangalore, measuring over an acre, that will significantly scale up its capacity.
The longer-term ambition goes further than physical expansion. Mithun talks about bringing software integrations into the manufacturing process — digital tools that will eventually help customers develop products faster at every stage. “Humans are always going to need more products,” he says. “Whether for productivity, time saving, or cost saving — product manufacturing has to get easier. That is what we are building Thriam towards.”
