Matthew Tuerk

We also had an industrial building that sort of funded our existence where we had a T-shirt manufacturer, an industrial valves manufacturer, and somebody who was building large-scale tents as tenants.

And they were kind of keeping the organization alive.

There was this – you know, in 2008, it was right kind of in the –

early days of the global financial crisis.

There's some concern about how we would recover economically, what we would do.

But these early investments in manufacturing were, from what I could see, looking ahead, something we shouldn't turn our backs on.

There was this seemingly healthy manufacturing economy in place in the Lehigh Valley.

And it felt like

it felt like there was an opportunity to build for the future i worked with our ceo our executive director at that time to start thinking about how we might position the area as a place where you could bring smaller footprint manufacturing we knew we had this building stock of buildings that were smaller than 100 000 square feet

sometimes on multiple stories.

It was a kind of gravity flow model of manufacturing where you would load in raw material at the top of the building.

And as it gained weight, it would drop down the building for a final finishing on the ground floor and then shipping.

We felt like there was an opportunity to kind of leverage the existing industrial inventory to attract manufacturers that were

More boutique.

I remember reading an article in the Wall Street Journal in maybe 2009 or 2010 about a bag manufacturer in San Francisco who was like very proud of being in San Francisco.

I was like, this is I think there's something here for us.

I reached out to the manufacturer at the time.

This was around the same time as the rise of maker spaces and 3D printing was coming online.

It looked like you could do some stuff in a smaller form factor.

We kept thinking this is a chance for us with these strong roots in manufacturing to bring some of it back.