During the first few years of its existence, a modest-sized warehouse and some office space were plenty to accommodate Principal LED’s needs. Its LED lighting products—mostly channel letter modules early on—were being manufactured in the company’s Taiwan-based factory, and the physical size of the products meant not much physical storage space was needed at the company’s headquarters in Texas.

But the company’s business model has since shifted—and that meant a need for more space, which it now has in its new building.

“What happened was, we discovered, as we developed some of our ‘Stik’ products. We found that there was a need for retrofit products that can fit directly into T-12 sockets, to replace (High-Output T-12s),” says Bryan Vincent, co-founder of Principal LED along with his younger brother Blake Vincent. 

“We found that most of the customers wanted a completed product that was ready to install, which created some logistics problems (to make them overseas)," says Bryan. "We found we could be more competitive, more flexible and offer a wider range of products, and multiple configurations, by actually doing the assembly here in Texas.”

The company recently moved into its new 10,000-square-foot facility in its hometown of San Angelo. “And we bought it on a couple acres, so if we needed to expand it gives us that option too,” he says.

The new facility is roughly twice the size of the old one, with much of the extra space being devoted to an assembly area. And building from the ground up allowed Principal LED to install some features missing in its old building.

“When we moved into this new facility we made a big investment in technology,” says Vincent, referring to a much more robust phone system, a customer relationship management system and warehouse management tools.

The move also fits the company’s physical needs following its tilt toward more value-added products.

“What you’re seeing in the industry is sort of a trend that there is a lot more market consolidation,” Vincent says. “It used to be that in the old days in the sign industry, there were a lot of little full-service sign shops and they built the signs, they installed the signs, they sort of did everything, and a lot of that had to do with the transport and the shipability of signs. But today there are a lot more wholesale operations. A lot of the sign companies, they essentially install and hang signs—and they’ll do repair and service.

“By creating this assembly operation, it allowed us to create products that those customers could use—not only the full-service sign shops and the wholesalers, but a product that an installer-only-type sign company could buy these materials and go out and do a T-12-to-LED retrofit with a bucket truck.”

Principal LED does offer components that sign shops can use to build their own custom signs for their clients, but Vincent says that end of the business is becoming less and less a core part of the company’s overall revenue stream.

“What we’re seeing is that customers are busier and busier today and they don’t have the time to, or they don’t necessarily want to, or have the facilities, to do a lot of custom fabrication,” he says. “So what we’re doing is we’re taking a portion that is not core to what they generally do, and we're putting the LEDs on some sort of substrate or a system that allows them to be easily used and installed by the sign maker.”

Speaking of revenue, Vincent estimates that his company has experienced about 60 percent growth, year-over-year, for each of the past three years.

The Vincent brothers made a major investment a year ago this month with the purchase of two companies they rolled into one. Last December the brothers, as part of a separate private investor group, got into the neon sign business with the purchase of Transco To Go, a neon sign equipment and electric sign component manufacturer, and Ventex Technology, an electronic neon power supply company.

The companies operate under the Ventex Technology name in Jupiter, Florida. Other than sharing some accounting staff, Ventex operates as a completely separate entity from Principal LED, Vincent said.

“Let’s be honest: There’s just not as much business (in the neon industry) as there used to be,” Vincent says. “What we were committed to doing is saying look, we want to support the neon industry, and we feel like neon has such a wonderful historical place but it also has a practical place, still, in our industry.”

Vincent says he’s very pleased with the progress of the newly consolidated company. They—Transco and Ventex—turned out to have very complementary product lines, he says.

One of the changes the new ownership has brought to Ventex is that the company now carries some LED products, which it had never done before, although its primary focus continues to be neon.

“We kind of offer almost everything except the glass, the actual neon glass itself,” says Vincent. “So as people are leaving the industry we’re trying to fortify our position and recognize that neon’s not going to go away completely; there’s still a nice piece of the market and a certain customer base that wants neon when they’re going for that certain look. So yeah, we’re pleased with the way that’s moved along.”

Ventex employs about a dozen people, Vincent says, while Principal LED has about 40 employees.

The Vincent brothers took another big step just a few weeks ago when they struck up a national distribution partnership deal between Principal LED and Louisville, Kentucky-based distributor N. Glantz & Son.

Vincent says he’s known many of the people at N. Glantz for at least a decade, and he’s thrilled to count the company as one of Principal’s valued partners.

“It’s huge,” Vincent says. “Obviously they’ve been around over 100 years, they’re really the largest sign supply distributor in the United States, and certainly on the electrical side—they’re probably the strongest electrical sign supply distributor out there. They’ve got a very good sales staff and support staff that understands signs; they have access to a lot of small- to mid-size customers which obviously, as a manufacturer, that’s hard to access.

“So it’s a great partnership and it’s a great conduit to reach more sign shops. So it’s definitely a big deal.”