Kobayashi: Warming Hands Around the World

Chang and Alice Yim came to America more than 50 years ago to attend college and pursue the American dream. In 1989, they founded Heatmax, Inc. and began distributing their signature product, HotHands® Warmers, to Walmart from their headquarters in Dalton. In the 1990s, their son, Daniel, who attended Georgia Tech and completed his degree at the University of Georgia, came on to manage the manufacturing of the hand warmers. In the mid-2000s, Heatmax was acquired by Kobayashi, a Japanese-based pharmaceutical company, and signaled a new dawn of manufacturing for the company. They maintained their headquarters in Georgia because of its great workforce and logistics infrastructure. Today, Kobayashi touches every region of the world with offices in the US, Japan, London, Shanghai, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia.

Georgia is very pro-business. You have great corporations like The Home Depot, Coca-Cola and UPS, who are headquartered here, and there’s a great talent pool to choose from. Between the small business credits, great infrastructure and temperate climate, you can’t beat doing business in Georgia.” – Daniel Yim, President, Kobayashi Consumer Products, LLC

What Georgia Offers Kobayashi

Partnership with GDEcD's International Trade team on global missions and tradeshows; introductions to new distributors and buyers in Europe
Partnership with Dr. W. Bradley Fain and the Georgia Tech Research Institute's Human Systems Engineering Branch on several research and development projects
Access to workforce from state and local colleges including the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Georgia, Georgia State University and Dalton State College

Learn more about what Georgia can do for Manufacturing and Small Business.