| New here, but not new to lighting. Twenty-five years in the business.
We're manufacturing A19 LED lamps in Fargo, North Dakota. First one shipped July 4th.
I know what this industry has been for the last twenty years. One closure after another. Every announcement was a plant going dark. I've watched it the same as everyone here, and I got tired of it.
So here's what we built, and I'll give you the details because I think this group is the one that will actually care.
We took three buildings sitting side by side and made them one. Sealed the shell from the roofline down and insulated it end to end, because you can't build precision electronics in a drafty steel building. Static-proof paint on the walls, static-proof epoxy on the floor. Then the systems: power, HVAC, precision temperature and humidity control, compressed air to every machine.
The line starts at SMT, and the board is ours, designed and engineered in-house. The bulb is ours too. We had a custom A19 mold built for our automation rather than copying a lamp designed to be built by hand overseas. It's a true A19 shape with a longer body, which gives us the surface area to actually dissipate heat, and heat is what kills these things. That mold was the decision that changed everything downstream. From there, automation produces the lamp, automation packages it, and robots palletize.
Board to pallet, one continuous line. I have not seen another that does all of it. At full capacity it runs 30,000 lamps in 24 hours, three shifts, three people a shift.
That last number is the whole answer to why the majors failed here. They tried to reshore the overseas model, which is people-heavy, and that math never works in this country. Then they tried to run LED in plants built for incandescent and fluorescent, which is a different product with different environmental requirements entirely. We didn't compete on labor. We competed with automation, and it works.
There was no playbook. Nobody hands you a blueprint for building a lamp factory in a country that quit making them. I traveled and looked at how it's done everywhere else, then we did it differently.
The important part isn't that we built one line. It's that we built a repeatable system. Every step documented, every problem solved once and written down. We're already working toward the second line.
I'm posting this because this industry has gone a long time without good news, and this is some. American lamp manufacturing isn't a memory. It's running today in Fargo, and it's going to run again. If we can bring one bulb home, the rest can follow.
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