A region, revitalize a region, re-imagined, striving, thriving, innovating, collaborating, elevating and accelerating the greater Lehigh Valley is home to businesses that are booming and paying changes that are forging a future.

This is Lehigh Valley Rising Bioscience Corporate Benefits is a proud supporter of Lehigh Valley Rising Break Boundaries at Lehigh University College of Business Unlock Your Future with a Fleck's MBA from Lehigh Business.

Additional support provided by St Luke's University Health Network.

It's safe to say that without good lighting you wouldn't be able to see me right now.

How often do we consider how important light can be?

Well, in this edition of Lehigh Valley Rising, we're going to do just that.

The Lehigh Valley is home to some of the lighting industry's biggest names, including the biggest name in the consumer lighting world.

Today, however, we're shining the spotlight on a few other businesses and entrepreneurs lighting?

up the world from the Lehigh Valley, such as eco tech, Marine, the aquarium and terrarium light company that's also making life under the sea a little brighter.

So here at Eco Tech, you'll you'll find that we're not just a manufacturing facility at our core We are hobbyists.

And learning how to keep and care for the animals is really foundational for everything that we do.

I was aquarists growing up.

I always had a fresh water tank.

So you just want to kind of explore and have them all.

Keeping reptiles has always been a passion of ten.

Mark's and that passion for us is really what facilitated turning this hobby into a business Being a hobbyist informs the decisions that we choose to make very purposefully with the design of the products that Welcome to the Eco Tech Aquarium Lab.

We make a number of different things for reef aquariums, so we started with the vortex propeller pump, and that creates currents in the aquarium like you have currents in the ocean.

After that, we created an LED light called the Radio on the radio, and light creates a very nice spectrum that creates both an esthetic environment and helps corals to grow.

This is a nice soft coral tank with a few really interesting species.

We've got a clown trigger here, we've got a snowflake here, and a nice smattering of clownfish, fish and Christmas.

We also produce a centrifugal pump called the vector.

Also, we manufacture a pump called the versus peristaltic pump, and it's designed to be a really flexible device.

You can do water changes that are automated or you can feed your tank.

All of it's controlled by the Moebius app for eco tech and the products.

Eco Tech is a member of the Aperture Patent Life Family, along with Neptune Systems.

Bulk Reef Supply and Aqua Illumination and now LEAP.

So in the last few years, we've expanded out into terrariums and together at Eco Tech, we designed a new habitat called the Leap Habitat Welcome to my favorite room of the building, the Leap Laboratory.

It's a new terrarium line and it's really quite innovative in ways that we think are going to be very impactful for the market.

This entire room is climate controlled in order to present exactly the environmental parameters that are happening in Madagascar with Leaf.

We took a lesson from eco tech Marine and we really wanted to create a complete ecosystem for terrestrial animals similar to how it's done for marine aquariums.

We have geckos, chameleons, and the whole room is a laboratory and testing.

Facility to.

Determine how best.

To breed these animals and how to create.

The most effective.

Equipment in order to breed these animals.

It's a passionate hobby.

A lot of enthusiasts and in this market segment with high end super premium products that are well-designed, very high quality and work really well.

It's really attractive to a.

Lot of people right now.

At ECOSOC, we have about 55 full time employees and between ten and 20 part time staff that come in and help us with assembly Here we are on the X hour.

15 ready on line all of our products are built here in Pennsylvania and assembled by our production staff.

We're a Pennsylvania based company.

The Founders went to school just 5 minutes down the road, and being able to capture that and say we're home grown is is important to the entire organization.

The company was founded by Tim Marks and Justin lawyer back in 1999.

They started manufacturing a product called Cow Floss or Reactor and they sold them to people online.

It wasn't until 2003 when Tim and I were at grad school at Lehigh and we worked with Lehigh University and essentially were able to create eco tech Marine out of a student garage startup.

The Lehigh Valley is a gem for American manufacturing, engineering, talent manufacture, nurturing talent, the right infrastructure, the right capabilities and a really healthy, balanced economy.

So the Lehigh Valley has been a very business friendly.

When we really started eco tech at Lehigh, there were a lot of programs, including Ben Franklin, City of Bethlehem, LV, EDC, there's just so many groups that are focused on helping entrepreneurs to be successful.

It's a wonderful place because all of that support structure has created an environment in which eco tech was allowed to thrive.

We're very excited to be part of the Lehigh Valley and the resurrection and renaissance of American manufacturing.

It's kind of a guess that we're manufacturing high tech products here in the Lehigh Valley and exporting them around the world, even into Southeast Asia, which I think is pretty cool.

Every schoolchild knows that plants need light to thrive, and specifically the light that comes from the sun now you can grow plants indoors.

Of course, people have been doing that for ages, but the process can be cumbersome, expensive, and those old grow lights could be an eyesore.

That's where Bethlehem's own Seoul Tech comes in.

Just five years after launching their Kickstarter, this young startup is changing the house playing game one bulb at a time.

A lot of our friends and families will ask us, you know, what are you doing after college?

What are you up to these days?

And say, Oh, we're making a grow like company.

And they'll say, What's a grow light?

It's a product.

We can grow plants indoors by replicating the sun.

Some people can have a dog.

Some people can have a cat.

Plants act as that life inside their home.

I mean, of course there's esthetics, but there's also health benefits clean air.

Higher productivity make you feel better.

There's something about sunlight that truly makes people feel good.

So tech started a few years ago when my Chris and I had just graduated college.

I got a call from Paul one day and he said, Hey, we have this idea.

Traditionally, grow lights.

They're big, large balance, utilitarian in nature, agricultural.

They're tucked away in your basement.

Your back rooms are closets because you're growing just crops.

You don't care how they look, you care more about the yield.

We start to realize why is there nothing for all of these people who just want to grow beautiful plants in their beautiful homes?

And so that really set us down the path of developing the aspect.

Our first grow, like we want to blend just with all of your other household lighting fixtures.

The only thing that's different about ours is that it also has the power of the sun our large white aspect really is our best seller.

It's our flagship product.

We've been selling it since the company started.

We just introduced the V to Grow Bulb, which is easier to install on your home and grow your plants to also at a lower price point.

We also offer the Highland Track Light System, so if you want a track light to pivot the light from play at the plant, or if you have a plant shelf, you can direct a light on the plant shelf.

So thousands of units across the US, across the globe, we've been featured on GQ Home Page.

Google's headquarters bought about 150 lights from us and their New York City headquarters.

Now we're projected this year to be around $5 million in revenue we're also introducing the concept of green fitting, which is outfitting a retrofitting traditional lighting fixtures with our lights, which reinforces the seamless integration of being able to grow a plant anywhere without even recognizing that there are grow lights all throughout the space supporting these plants.

The growth has been incredible, not long ago it was just the three founders the end of 2016.

We started the Kickstarter.

Bringing plants inside your home is a great way to liven up your interior.

We saw.

So Tech Solutions have found a way to reinvent.

The Sun provides for the greener, fresher home.

Our goal was, I think $18,000 and we exceed that goal.

We got the money and then we started producing lights and the next step was, all right, we got it.

We have to go legit.

We never had an office prior.

We were working out of a friend's basement we were looking for a place to establish our company in our lives.

We chose Bethlehem because we were browsing the Internet of the top 100 places to start a company.

I like to think of Lehigh Valley as a startup city in a way, like it's fast growing you know, there's a lot of room for innovation.

It's in a Keystone Innovation Zone, South Side, Bethlehem.

We get help from the government we get access to grants, we get access to internship reimbursements, all these opportunities and incentives to bring people here to really just grow and chase the opportunity.

And we said, you know what?

It's a great location, low cost of living, plenty to do.

Let's give it a shot.

We moved here, the Keystone Innovation Zone, the pie building.

We are now at over 20 employees growing very strongly all sorts of different types.

We have assemblers, we have marketing teams.

We have h.R.

And it's created a beautiful culture where everybody enjoys coming each day.

There's something about seoul tech where it doesn't just feel like any startup business.

It feels like it's creating an entire new space.

Everyone here cares about each other and cares about the success of the company.

And that common goal.

Yes, it turns on LinkedIn and on.

Plant will grow.

It's our way of knowing that what we're shipping out is quality.

That it actually works when you plug it in and that people aren't getting something that isn't functional.

My recommendation to young entrepreneurs out there is to just stick with it.

If you know you have a good idea, do not quit on that idea.

It's going to be hard.

It's going to take years, but just stick with it.

We've made this with our own hands.

Still do to this day.

We have put in a line of assembly assistants and product technicians that really enjoy making this lot goes into it, but we're very proud of it.

A lot of thought goes into building any consumer products, and lighting is no different.

How bright is too right?

What levels of UV light are safe?

Where will your light be installed?

Will it pass environmental and health standards there's more to it than you might think, and that's where Allentown based Light Lab Solutions comes in.

Sir Isaac Newton, who was sure that there was more to sunlight than meets the eye.

So he dropped a sunbeam and passed it through a president.

And there were the colors of the rainbow, the component parts of white light.

My name is Michael, rather.

I'm one of two partners of Light Lab International, Allentown.

We test light here we are in the Garnier cytometry room.

We're measuring just one particular direction of light at a time the mirror is used to bounce the light back to a detector in the back of the room.

And as we scan the mirror around the mirror allows us to get a different view of the light source.

And that different view of the light source gives us an intensity distribution that intensity distribution then is used in software to calculate what the light levels within a room will be once they've been installed.

And we're measuring the total amount of light that's available from a light source.

We can also look at how much light arrives at a certain point in space.

The measurements that we take could be within an office building, for instance, and you might be looking at making sure that the task is being lit to a space that's allowing people to be able to read.

It might be also a roadway or an area light will take measurements.

In this integrating sphere, we can calculate the energy efficiency or the efficacy of the lamp as part of the testing that we do on lead products.

We also do a temperature test at the hottest point on the Lumina, and then that is used to help indicate what the lifetime of the product is going to be.

The most amount of testing that we do is for midsize companies who may not have their own internal laboratory and may be looking for a third party laboratory certification to various energy efficiency programs.

80% of our testing is done for energy efficiency programs.

They have a list of requirements that the products need to meet.

And as the technology is increasing and changing through the years, they're adding new metrics to it.

Flicker becomes very important because it can actually make people sick.

It can cause people to have seizures, and it can be just downright annoying.

The consumers aren't going to want that if they bring a product home, put it in their house, they see it flickers like that or it makes their kids sick.

Yeah, out the window it's going to go.

There's a lot of work right now going on in health care.

If you use the UAV for Germicide or sterilization, you can also use it to disinfect the air by having what's called upper room germicide all units.

You can also use it to sterilize surfaces and various types of PPE was being cleaned with.

You've seen.

And this is the band of rage that became the goal for inventors of ultraviolet ray generators.

Can tell them precisely where within the UV range is that UV, is it actually falling into UVB or UVA that could be even more dangerous.

So what you don't want to do is have someone be careless and put in fixtures that are going to harm the occupants.

The light can help you to feel comfortable in a space according to the spectrum of the light, whether it's a bluish color or whether it's a warmer, redder kind of color like incandescent or candle light.

And they can contribute to the mood of the area, and that affects overall health.

I like the idea that this is something that influences everybody's perception of their environment, and many times people don't even realize that it's the lighting that's doing it.

Whether you're lighting a fish tank, a house plant or a home, all electric lights have one thing in common and that's the word electric.

Since 1920, the Pennsylvania Power and Light Corporation, also known as people, has been there to make sure that when we flick that switch, everything goes according to plan.

When you think about peak electric utilities, we say every day we deliver we don't own power plants, so we don't generate electricity and we purchase electricity the same way that you as a customer would purchase your electricity.

We don't make any profit on the electricity that we purchase and then supply to you at peak electric utilities.

We are the poles and the wires we deliver the electricity and we want to make sure that when we deliver that electricity to you that it is in the best possible way.

We are seeing massive change in the energy industry.

We'll probably going to see more change in our next ten years.

We're seeing more resources, energy resources show up like solar battery or wind or which we didn't have before.

We're seeing homes put some of these energy sources on their roofs.

Those changes, you know, are changing how a good operates.

Now we're seeing what's commonly called now a two way flow.

So you're seeing energy being produced at home, you're seeing energy being produced, how to large power plants, and the power is flowing both directions.

So our grid is not designed to do that.

It's important to me that we all think from the customer's perspective, we offer a lot of opportunities for customers to tell us about their outage.

Our advanced technology often identifies it at the same time, sometimes even before we're sending out crews and we'll be able to fix it really quickly.

Instead of waiting for the outage to happen and then restore customers fast.

We would rather prevent the outage in a way where we could quickly get the power back to the customers so they don't even notice that they have an outage this is a distribution control center.

Where you looking behind me here is what we have.

Operators a lot of times the operators need to intervene.

That's what you're looking at here.

We invested in the last five, six years in that smart grid technology.

And I think we still are the only utility in the country who has that advanced grid.

The last thing that we would ever want to have happen is for customers power to be shut off.

Sometimes customers find themselves a little bit behind in their bills the payment arrangements allows them to level those out and to find a way to catch up on track is available to low income customers who qualify.

And it provides lower flexing both monthly payment as well as some debt forgiveness.

We also offer a program that we've called WRAP.

It's a people program that enables us to help customers by going into their home and providing them with energy efficiency advice.

Things like LED light bulbs and other, you know, helpful hints on how they can control their energy usage.

We deliver your electricity to your home we deliver the electricity to your business, and we also deliver to the communities we worked with the Allentown School District and The Da Vinci Science Center, and we provide it hands on learning kits through the Smithsonian.

So that these students were able to learn about science during the pandemic we're also working on a very unique project called Teachers in Industry, where we will have teachers from the Allentown School District working with us this summer.

So that they will learn how subjects like physics and chemistry work every day, and they can go back to their classroom and say, this is why I'm teaching you physics.

I worked for you all this summer and this is what you'll do.

It's a brand new program as part of empowering ethical communities.

And we are extremely proud of it.

We know that we're only as successful as the communities and the regions and the customers that we have the opportunity to serve so giving back to our communities and volunteering for our communities is at the very core of what we do.

We recently had the chance to sit down with People's New President, Steph Raymond, the first woman, to hold that position about what it takes to provide power to 1.4 million homes and businesses, and what challenges and opportunities may lie ahead.

Welcome, Steph.

The first female utility president in the company's 100 year history.

When you were a little girl, was that your plan?

No.

And I think it's awesome.

But no, that wasn't my plan.

It's interesting.

I I'm I'm a California native.

I moved out to the East Coast about 20 years ago.

I I'm prudently variable not put on my I'm from the telecom industry and then started the utility industry about 11 years ago.

I never quite had a plan.

I didn't say, gosh, I'm going to set out to be the first female president of a 100 year old utility company.

But I always I have a natural way of taking risks.

And I have a lot of courage to take risks.

And I just started my journey saying, I'm going to take opportunities.

I've moved around.

I take every stretch assignment And that is what actually afforded me, I think the development, you know, my leadership development and just taking these opportunities and stretch assignments.

And it's been truly awesome.

I always tell people I don't necessarily define myself as the first female president, but I also appreciate the responsibility that comes with that.

Right.

I know there are women looking up and saying, hey, how did you do that?

Well, tell me about some of those risks or some of those stretches.

Yeah.

And so I've always taken assignments where it doesn't matter if someone said, hey, staff, do you want to try this job?

I've never, ever thought that I couldn't do the job.

I just went into it thinking I may not have all the experience.

I may not have, you know, the background, I may not have the education that aligns with that position, but I think I can do it.

And so I went into every job thinking I could do it.

It's taking risks, but I think it's also courage.

I just have a lot of courage to try new things, new things.

And I think that's also why people have approached me with stretch assignments, because they know I have a lot of courage to take on assignments and opportunities.

I think that's a great mantra, though.

I can do this.

Yep.

I can do it.

And that's that's that's just wonderful because oftentimes people hold themselves back because I agree.

They think they can't do it or there's not 100% certainty of success.

So I can do this.

Sounds like a great mantra to have.

I'd like to learn more about some of your division's workforce initiatives.

Yes.

Tell us about that.

So diversity equity and inclusion is we talk about the knitting and foundational.

It is we can't be the best utility in the nation.

Without having a diverse workforce.

We just can't be.

And it's interesting, as a female leader and first in 100 years on the operating company side of Electric Utilities, when I talk about diversity, people generally think I'm talking about gender diversity, and it's absolutely not.

So in order to be the best utility in the nation, which we aspire to be, you have to be extremely innovative, extremely advanced, and you have to solve problems in ways we've never solve problems before.

The only way you can do that is to have a diverse group of people sitting around a table solving those problems.

And so I am very focused on thinking about our workforce.

How do you how do you create more jobs?

But then when you're hiring, how do you make sure you have an opportunity for all and for everyone to sit around that table?

To be extremely diverse in thought?

So we embarked a while ago on thinking about different educations, different backgrounds, different gender, different races, different experiences.

It's all about solving problems.

And in order to be very innovative and very advanced, you need a different workforce.

And it's something we're extremely proud of at PBL that we've embarked on this and really making a difference.

That sounds fantastic.

Well, Steph, thank you so much for joining us today.

I appreciate it.

Thanks, Georgette and Steph.

And thank you at home for watching.

You can catch this episode and all past episodes of Lehigh Valley Rising on our website, PBS.

39 dot org.

From all of us here, I'm Grover Silcox.

We'll see you next time.

BSI Corporate Benefits is a proud supporter of Lehigh Valley Rising.

The Vista Institute for Executive Learning and Research at Lehigh University College of Business provides programs for working professionals.

Additional support provided by St Luke's University Health Network.