In 1958, Joanna Western Mills, a Chicago-based manufacturer of coated cloth products for the rubber industry, entered a joint venture with Phillips Petroleum to form the Phillips-Joanna Company, which specialized in the use of high density polyethylene plastic to produce cigarette-wrapping films. The Phillips-Joanna manufacturing facility was constructed in Ladd, Illinois, and began production in 1959. Within a few years, the joint venture terminated and Phillips-Joanna became a wholly owned division of Joanna Western Mills.

In the early 1960's, IBM asked Phillips-Joanna to develop a film substrate for their recently introduced correctable typewriter. As the correctable typewriter grew in popularity, the Phillips-Joanna product set a worldwide benchmark for correctable ribbons as specified by equipment manufacturers and supply companies alike.

In 1986, an investment group acquired Joanna Western Mills. The window shade business was sold and the remaining company was renamed Industrial Coatings Group. In 1998, ICG acquired Holliston Mills, a major competitor in the coated cloth market, and its cloth manufacturing was relocated to the Holliston facility in Kingsport, Tennessee.  As part of the relocation, the remaining film extrusion assets in Chicago were moved to the Phillips-Joanna facility.

On January 24, 2000, Tee Group Films, Inc. acquired the Phillips-Joanna division from ICG.

Tee Group Films is presently owned and maintained by Thomas J. Lavelle, a former CEO of ICG, and Thomas H. Malpass, who has been the vice president of Film Operations at ICG for the past eleven years.

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