Ruud Lighting: From garage to gargantuan

Ruud and his partners designed new lights that had better thermal distribution, or heat-shedding ability, than the competition, he said. So they had both a price and quality advantage, which they conveyed via advertising, direct-mail catalogs and trade shows.

As they built the business in the garage in 1982, Christopher Ruud - now president of Ruud Lighting - was just a kid helping his parents.

"My first job was vacuuming the carpets and cleaning the bathrooms. My mom would do HR (human resources) work."

He recalled, "Any time the copy machine button was pushed, all the lights in the house would dim."

Manufacturing couldn't happen in the garage, so the partners had an 11,800-square-foot building erected on Highway 11 for them to lease. They mark Dec. 1, 1982, when manufacturing began, as the company's official birth date.

They started with a few office people and six assemblers. "LED (assembly) is rocket science compared to what that was," Sokoly said.

Of those earliest employees, he said, "Most people stuck with us till retirement."

In late December, Alan Ruud recalled, they got an order and a $25,000 check in the mail.

About six months later, they first turned a profit - on paper. But all early profits went directly into the business.

"We were doubling our business every year," Alan Ruud said, so they had to keep adding

facilities, tooling and the like. It was three years before they started taking money out.

Ruud Lighting has reached some of its biggest milestones since Jan. 2, 1998, when the partners sold the company to Advance Lighting Technologies for $35.5 million and 3 million shares of stock in that company.

The union didn't last long. Four years later, Ruud Lighting executives bought the company back, although Wandler chose not to be an owner. The company still calls that date, Dec. 12, 2001, Independence Day.

"We didn't understand the cultural differences, and that's all I'll say about that," Alan Ruud said.

The next huge development was Ruud Lighting's plunge into light-emitting diode lighting. In the past several years, 100 percent of its research and development has been in LED, in which company owns more than 100 patents.

A stunning announcement came in August when Ruud Lighting announced its second acquisition - this time to Durham, N.C.-based Cree for $525 million.

And Tuesday, parent Cree and subsidiary Ruud Lighting announced a $24.5 million expansion here and plans to hire 469 more people within four years.

Looking ahead, Alan Ruud said, the company's mission will be: "To take all that lighting installed in the last 50 years, and replace it with LED lighting."