HISTORY
Company History
Every great company starts with a simple belief. For MEBULBS, it began in a Fargo garage in 1974 with two North Dakota farm boys turned visionaries who believed that lighting could be better, smarter, and longer-lasting. They didn't just want to sell bulbs. They wanted to light the way to a brighter future.
The Spark That Started It All: The 1970s
It's 1974. Energy prices are soaring, and businesses everywhere are struggling to keep the lights on without breaking the bank. From their modest garage headquarters, our founders saw an opportunity to revolutionize industrial lighting. Their answer? The groundbreaking Multi-Watt® incandescent lamp, a game changer that delivered both energy savings and longer lamp life. We were so sure of it's quality and life, we backed it up with a written guarantee! It was innovation born from necessity, and it lit the path forward for everything to come.
But MEBULBS didn't just innovate in the lab. We revolutionized how we connected with customers, creating a nationwide network of lighting professionals who brought personalized expertise right to your facility. No call centers, no runarounds. Just real people solving real lighting challenges face-to-face.
Growing Brighter: The 1980s
The 1980s brought a powerful realization: great lighting shouldn't come at the earth's expense. Enter the Premira® fluorescent lamp line, featuring reduced mercury content that proved you could have brilliant, long-lasting light while treading more lightly on the planet. As demand grew, we kept expanding our product line, testing and building a complete range of long-life lighting solutions for every application. To serve our growing customer base nationwide, we also established a national warehouse in the Chicago area, ensuring faster delivery and better service coast to coast.
Shining Even Brighter: The 1990s
By the nineties, MEBULBS had discovered something powerful: when you take care of your people, they take care of your customers. Many team members built entire careers with us, bringing decades of expertise to every client interaction. This stability fueled rapid innovation as we pioneered whiter, brighter lighting technologies (the early DNA of what would become our Xtrabrite™ and Vitalux™ technology) and mastered the art of long-life solutions that slashed maintenance headaches for our customers. By the late nineties, we had outgrown our Chicago warehouse. A larger facility was built and completed in 1999, just in time for the new millennium.
Lighting the Nation: The 2000s
From garage startup to America's premier industrial lighting provider, the journey was remarkable. By 2000, MEBULBS had built something rare: a nationwide presence that still felt personal. Our secret? Never compromising quality for growth. Never chasing every trend. Always putting customer needs first. It's a philosophy that transformed one-time buyers into lifelong partners and helped us light facilities from coast to coast.
During this decade, MEBULBS pioneered the development of our Xtreme Duty™ technology, introducing high-temperature-rated products engineered to deliver longer-lasting, more energy-efficient lighting. At the same time, we emerged as early adopters of LED technology, advancing our whiter and brighter Xtrabrite LED solutions, backed by industry-leading guarantees of up to twelve years.
Fifty-Plus Years and Still Glowing
Today, over five decades since that first garage workshop, MEBULBS stands as proof that doing right by people and planet isn't just good ethics. It's great business. We're still headquartered in Fargo, still committed to premium quality manufacturing, and still driven by that original 1974 spark: the belief that better lighting creates better workplaces, better efficiency, and a better world. Our core focus is still to save our customers time, energy, and money.
For MEBULBS, the why has always been crystal clear: make brighter, whiter spaces where people work, reduce environmental impact, and build relationships that last as long as our bulbs do.
Here's to the next fifty years of lighting the way forward. We'd be happy to have you join us on the journey.