A Brooklyn-grown design company is now setting its sights on the Hudson Valley as the backdrop for its new headquarters.
RBW, short for Rich Brilliant Willing, a play on the names of founders Theo Richardson, Charles Brill and Alexander Williams was founded in 2008, and is now an award-winning LED lighting fixture design company.
RBW finds its customer base mainly in architects and designers, often for commercial settings such as restaurants, stores and offices. Some of their biggest corporate customers include Google, Panera Bread, Starbucks and Avalon Properties.
The company handles the entire process of designing, manufacturing and fulfilling orders in-house at their 10,000-square-foot Industry City facility in Brooklyn, along with a warehouse and logistics facility in New Jersey ”” all of which will begin to be carried out this fall at their new factory at 521-599 Boices Lane, at the IBM TechCity campus in the town of Ulster.
RBW will retain its SoHo showroom at 50 Greene St.
“Moving to the new facility, like I mentioned, it definitely allows us to increase headcount on site, but it also gives us the space to do even more internally ”” more prototyping, more custom finishing, more inventory,” said Alan Ince, director of people at RBW. “I think that”™s one of the biggest things is not only being a design manufacturing company, but being able to house the inventory is not as possible in a major city. Whereas (in Kingston) you have the space to house a lot of things in-house, which cuts lead times.”
The new factory is a former IBM site that RBW bought from 935 Associates LLC of Liverpool, New York. The new space will be almost 10 times the size of its current home, totaling about 98,000 square feet. It has been partially unoccupied for decades.
The company has roughly 50 employees working in New York and remotely, and will have 38 full-time employees relocating with it to Kingston. It is expected to add 18 more full-time positions over the next three years as a result of being able to expand in the new quarters.
With a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in the United States and retaining its status as a certified B Corporation, RBW is concerned with social and environmental sustainability in its growth while making the move. The company’s average pay is $48,000 for medium-skilled workers and roughly $83,600 for high-skilled workers.
“One thing when it comes to job opportunities, one thing that I”™m strong on is that we’re not (doing) anything that’s not gonna be sustainable,” Ince said. “We want to be able to create jobs and career paths. So a lot of our employees, although we’re a somewhat young company from Brooklyn, have been there for five years, which is a big thing, especially for this generation. So if we can create opportunities at all levels and have clear career growth paths, that’s what we want to do. We have a work-from-anywhere model, but our locations, our positions that’ll be in place, we want to have all these locals and then grow together.”
According to Ince, several members of the RBW team have already begun the relocation process in preparation for a fall opening.
“Once we knew that we’re moving to Kingston, some people took the initiative to get ahead of the game and move there already,” Ince said. “So although we’re not officially fully open yet, we do have a good amount of team members in the area and we’re in the process, in the construction phase of setting up temporary offices so you don’t have to work from home. We can start building our local community already before we have a ribbon-cutting moment.”
Production is expected to overlap between the Brooklyn and Kingston facilities in October and November, as the company completes the full transition.
The first stage of planning for the “factory of the future” includes a 20,000-square-foot multipurpose office space and a 60,000-square-foot production facility, which will also support research and development, and support efforts toward automation, according to RBW’s application to the Ulster County IDA.
The full construction timeline is anticipated to be almost a year long after starting this past June, with a $5.8 million total private-sector investment over the next three years, according to the Ulster County IDA resolution regarding the project.
As for the design of the space, Ince said that RBW is hoping to meld older aspects of its Brooklyn base with the history and environmental aspects of the Hudson Valley. It will also emphasize a minimal ecological footprint and incorporate rooftop solar panels for power.
“We’re going for a very similar feel to our current space,” he said. “One thing was that we don’t want to lose the feel of RBW regardless of the location we’re in, but we also don’t want to be so completely different from the Hudson valley culture.”
Kingston’s Dutton Architecture firm is working on the project design, along with Neil Logan, an architect based in New York City. Dutton specializes in adaptive reuse.
Utilizing existing industrial spaces like the TechCity campus and attracting new professionals and artisans such as designers, coders, craftspeople, filmmakers, artists, musicians, performers and specialized manufacturers is a key part of Ulster County’s strategic economic plan, which the county’s Office of Economic Development released in 2020.
“Our move to Kingston is a dream come true for our company and a great opportunity to implement our complete vision for RBW,” said Williams, who also serves as RBW’s director of growth.
“We have long been inspired by some of Europe”™s most visionary manufacturing campuses that reflect a thoughtful and holistic approach to planning a company”™s footprint. In this new facility, we are driven by creating a space where our operations, our people and the environment can flourish.”
