Coast Products, the Portland-based company known for making knives and lighting products, has added another category to their portfolio: safety gear.
"We've been making products that make people's jobs safer ever since my grandfather started the company in 1919," said David Brands, CEO of Coast Products. "That's been our mission statement; the products that we make have a technological advantage and they make whatever job they're designed to do safer and easier for the person doing them. So it was really a natural, a natural extension of things that we've been doing for over a hundred years.
"The other thing that got us more directly linked to safety gear is that we're now one of the premium portable lighting companies in America," Brands added. "We make a lot of flashlights and headlamps, and 65% of those are purchased by people to do their job, so they're really geared at the professional. When we embraced LED technology over 20 years ago, that really opened up the door for all kinds of new lighting products. So again, it was a natural extension to safety gear from the flashlights and headlamps that we had been providing to tradesmen and tradeswomen for the last 25 years."
Brands also noted that all Coast products, including the line of safety gear, are covered by the company's lifetime warranty.
"People can buy them with confidence," he said. "I think they'll find that we've brought a lot of innovative, much safer products to market."
