I feel like the innovation is being able to adapt to what the customer's needs are.

We're a sewing manufacturing plant and we make fabric reusable bags for cash security and document security along with some promotional bags.

We pretty much have an offering for any type of business in the entire country.

We have bags for amusement parks, we have bags for banks, we have bags for the government, we have bags for restaurants.

It's for different denominations and so sewn into the bag is different dividers for pennies, nickels, dimes, so they each have their own section.

We do things for funerals, flag bags, urn bags.

These are some of the larger urn bags that we make for funeral homes to distribute and we print the funeral home's name right on them and these have a nice like velvety finish to them.

We can do anything, we can sell anything if if somebody's got a need.

So you know when the marijuana market started booming out west it was like okay they're all cash-based like we have cash bags how can we help them and the most recent endeavor of student cell phones being an issue so we came up with a more budget-friendly option.

For a long zipper bag we could most likely get about 5,000 out the door in one day.

That goes from just getting a blank panel to running the zipper on it, putting the bottom stop and slider on, solving the bag to make sure that it's closed, turning it, and then packaging it in the bag in mostly bundles of 25.

We do that for different you know Staples companies and Wells Fargo, Bank of America, U .S.

Bank.

Our top I'll say top three markets are the election market, the bank market, and the federal government.

We sell to Navy, we sell to Army, we sell to Marines, we sell to all of them walking bags that they don't always tell us what they're putting in it.

For the election market we have bags that are for provisional ballots that we designed a ballot slot that is secure.

This is our patented keel security closure system so the way it works is most of these bags have a window that can't be accessed from the outside so you would access the card if that's how you want to keep a record and you would write down like who it's going to and the date and the seal number that's on the seal.

These are all one-time use seals and then if you record that number or if you're going to use a barcode system as long as the number matches you know that nobody got in and read whatever that document was.

If the seal is missing or if the number is different you know that somebody tampered with it so to open it again you just break the seal and then it just opens right back up.

We also have bags that are designed to fit inside of the machine so when you feed your paper ballot through inside of that machine is our bag catching it and then they can secure that bag before it's transported to the precinct.

I am the fifth generation of the Rifkin family.

In 1892 Abraham Rifkin started the company.

He was my great great grandfather.

It's been passed down since then.

My father would bring home bags that he wanted zippers tested and he'd say here zip and unzip this bag a hundred times while you're watching television and earn allowance this week.

It was just always something we were exposed to.

In 2011 when the river was rising again and they were worried about flooding they had a lot of sandbags so our canvas bags that a lot of places use for coins they used to fill with dirt and sand to pack the levy with and then once crisis was averted we grabbed one of the bags to keep as a souvenir.

This is our only facility so all of our cut and sew and everything is done right here everything is sewn here right here in Luzerne County.

This was a big sewing area way back when it's a skill that is more homegrown now I feel than being taught.

There's a lot more than you realize of manufacturing in northeast Pennsylvania from you know the mining days from people just working hard.

A lot of people have a lot of work ethic around here and that's what I like mostly about northeast Pennsylvania.

I'm biased towards northeast PA.

It's nice being able to walk the floor and really know everyone.

This is one of our standard Rifkin safety sacks just a lock and key bag so it has a design element where the key can't be removed when the bag is unlocked so you can't accidentally lock your key in your bag but we have a metal zipper which is more secure than a nylon zipper and a seven pin lock again for extra security.

One of the things that we always talk about with working here is that you're making something you're you get to make a bag that's going into a bank or an election or a restaurant it's meaningful and they get to actually produce something that's kind of cool at the end.