Well-known Products
"The first cop that got one in the department showed everyone else and suddenly all the cops said `oh my gosh, I've got to have one of those;" he says. "Slowly but surely, we got departments to buy them and one thing led to another and the product became very well known."
Streamlight was on the road to success with a commercially viable product.
From that light, the company was able to spin off several other products, including the LiteBox. Nearly all the products since have focused on smaller, brighter, lightweight, stronger and longer lasting.
In 1982, Streamlight bought a competitor, KEL-Light, a machined-aluminum flashlight manufacturer with its own product line. Before that, Streamlight only had rechargeable flashlights, so the purchase opened up a whole new market.
Non-Rechargeable Lights
"We bought it for two reasons," Penney says. "First, they had an existing line of nonrechargeable machined-aluminum flashlights and, two, they had a production machine shop in Barstow, Calif., so we decided we'd get into the machining business."
Through the 1980s, Penney says Streamlight was a company in transition, selling a variety of products, most of which were getting smaller and smaller.
"We developed the Streamlight Junior, then we made a PocketMate with two triple-A batteries," Penney says. A key chain light was also very popular in the 1980s. "The whole mini-light phase gave us a boost in sales and miniature lights are very, very successful today, 20 years later."
The Stinger Is A Standard
Streamlight's next milestone was the introduction of the Stinger
in 1994, a light that has become a standard in the law enforcement service.
"That was a complete home run for us and it has been
from the day we introduced it," Penney says. "It's
our bread and butter product," he says. "There hasn't
been anything any competitor has come out with that has come
close to the Stinger."
With the exception of three or four years after Streamlight
bought KELLite, the company has out-sourced its components,
all of which are made to Streamlight specifications. About
80 percent are made in the United States. Electronic circuitry, particularly, is foreign made.
"Our experience with manufacturing turned out to be a huge mistake," Penney says. "We quickly learned that we were not manufacturers."
"We could have a factory full of machines, but this way, we don't have a huge capital investment and have to worry about keeping those machines running all the time."
Sharrah
points out that keeping up with the latest machining technology can be very challenging and running a machine shop is limiting.
"Instead of focusing on customer needs, and new product development, you're worried about loading your equipment and designing products to keep machines running," he says. "That's not what we want to do. Our experience with KEL-Light put an exclamation point on our decision not to be in the manufacturing business."
Sharrah says Streamlight's core competencies are in the engineering and design of products, as well as the final assembly where quality control is critical, and marketing.
Numerous Configurations
"We can configure products to customers' needs from the
thousands of parts and components built to our specifications
somewhere else," Sharrah says. "That gives
us tremendous flexibility. We can do plastic, metal, we can have rechargeables, we can have non-rechargeables."
He calls the engineering department a real competitive advantage of Streamlight, the place where the company's "behind the curtain" expertise lies.
"We've had a number of firsts in this industry," Sharrah says: Streamlight was the first to develop the million candlepower flashlight, the first to introduce a halogen rechargeable flashlight and the first to use a Light Emitting Diode (LED) in a flashlight. "We have 80 in active patents and 26 pending today and we work very hard at protecting our work." He adds, "With all the off-shore competition, it's critically important that we protect our ideas and patents."
During a recent tour of the plant a team of engineers was working on a product so new it didn't yet have a name.
Picking up a prototype of the light from an engineer's desk, Sharrah points out its unique features. The orange LiteBox case had sprouted taillights, mirroring another new product, the Vulcan, which was introduced last year.
The LEDs on the back of the LiteBox, like the sister product, makes it easier for firefighters and rescue workers to see each other from behind.
"We calling this the FireBox," he says admiring it in the incubation stage. "There's a lot of cache in the LiteBox name, so we've decided to playing off that name."
Moving to another engineering cubicle, Sharrah picks up a small black object that looks like the body of a cylindrical flashlight.
"We grew this one here," he says to puzzled visitors. Sophisticated computer equipment allows Streamlight engineers to prototype products three dimensionally in plastic. They operate highpower computer-aided drafting programs and 3D modeling software.
Tucked into a corner in the engineering division is a device Sharrah describes as a "three-dimensional printer." Working like an ink jet printer, the machine extrudes melted plastic in a three-dimensional pattern on an X, Y and Z axis. Several minutes after hitting the "print" command, a physical prototype is produced, allowing the engineer and research and development staff to actually hold and examine the item they've just designed.
"The machine saves us from shipping things out for machine work and molding," Sharrah says.
At another area Sharrah shows where products are extensively tested. Rechargeable batteries are put on a five-month testing regimen before Streamlight accepts them for its products.
He explained that engineers and quality control personnel look for self discharge rates, gas vent emissions, cycle times and battery life. "It's obscure stuff, but all very important," Sharrah says.
"Not every battery meets these tests," he says. "Right now, we have only two qualified battery suppliers for our nickel cadmium batteries."
In the same area, bulbs are tested for length of service and lumen output and all bulbs are batch tested before they are installed in the lights.
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Return to Part Two
Continue to Part Four