Diamond Vogel broke ground for their new facility in Orange City. (KSOU photo)
Diamond Vogel paint broke ground for their new Innovation Center Wednesday in Orange City.
The 36,000 square-foot facility will house Research & Development personnel and provide additional office space. Current Diamond Vogel CEO and President, Jeff Powell, says he sees the company’s future in the 15 million dollar investment.
“We look at an Innovation Center and say ‘boy that’s not cheap.’ And then we say to ourselves, ‘what is that return on investment going to be?’, and it’s hard to put a number on it,” Powell says. “But what we know is if we don’t have new products and new technologies to meet our customers’ needs, we are not going to be in existence.”
Company chairman, Drew Vogel, says after an expansion several years ago that spread them out over the campus, the Innovation Center will bring them back together for greater collaboration. “Even though we have a lot of different product lines using a lot of different technology — if they can rub shoulders with one another and it can be done in a convenient way in the course of doing business every day — they are just able to exchange a lot of ideas and stimulate new thought for new products,” Vogel says.
Vogel’s grandfather emigrated from Holland and sold the first gallon of paint in Orange City 95 years ago. He says the company is always challenged to stay on the edge of new technology, especially with the need to be environmentally safe. “To get products that really do the job and do it in a way in a way that cares for the environment is a challenge, and our chemists are up to it,” according to Vogel. “It takes a lot of work — but they’ve really made a lot of good progress.”
The new Innovation Center is expected to be completed by the end of 2022.
(By Mark Buss, KSOU, Sioux Center)