Cali Raised LED
What: Cali Raised LED is an ecommerce and distribution company providing vehicle specific LED lighting, trail armor, and off-road accessories.
Company founded: 2017
Number of employees: 30+
Where: 5216 David Strickland Road
Fort Worth, 76119
817-803-6003
Website: https://caliraisedled.com/
Fort Worth Report spoke with Blake Hamar, president of Cali Raised LED, about the business. This interview has been edited for content, grammar and clarity.
Bob Francis: How did you find your way from California to Fort Worth?
Hamar: We attended a show in Fort Worth, the Texas Trophy Hunters Expo. We were always kind of thinking about moving the company out of California as it was growing, just to be able to get a better facility, be more centrally located. We looked at Arizona, or somewhere in the east. Then we came to Fort Worth, and we’re like, “This is a great spot.”
We ended up saying, “This is the spot to be.” I ended up moving here and several others (did, too). I think we brought eight or nine people from California with us.
Francis: Tell us a little bit about your business.
Hamar: The main business we have is called Cali Raised LED, and what we do is we manufacture all kinds of aftermarket automotive accessories, mainly for the Overland Toyota market. We make bumpers, we make roof racks, we make skid plates, we do all the off-road LED lighting, all that kind of stuff. We have two facilities. One facility is a manufacturing facility, so with laser cutting machines, press brakes, robotic welders, all the manufacturing equipment you could think of. Our other facility is our distribution center, and that’s where we pack and we’ll ship the product directly to the end user. That’s kind of our operation and what we do, and we just make a lot of cool stuff.
Francis: Do you sell direct, or do y’all go through third parties?
Hamar: We have about 350 dealers and distributors in the U.S., and then we also sell direct to the customer through our own ecommerce site.
Francis: How many square feet then do you have there?
Hamar: Our manufacturing building is 26,000 square feet. And then the distribution building, I think that’s another 18,000 or 20,000 square feet. It’s a pretty cool facility because what we ended up doing is our current building, and our new building, aren’t connected, but we have the entire block on the street. We have a two-acre complete paved yard connecting the buildings and it’s all able to be within one gate. It’s on three and a half, four acres, they call it the compound. But it’s pretty neat because we were able to all keep it under one gate.
Francis: How has business been?
Hamar: When we were back in California, we were in a 6,000-square-foot building, with eight people, three years ago. So we’ve grown.
Francis: You’re in the Sun Valley Industrial Park. How did you find your way there?
Hamar: A funny story is two years ago before we moved to Texas, we actually looked at the building we’re currently in. When we were back in California, I said, “Man, that would be the dream building.”
Two years later, as we were getting ready to move, the building was actually still for sale. And we bought it. It was actually kind of a funny thing that the only commercial property I’ve ever looked at in Texas is the one that we ended up moving into. And I looked at it two years before and I took a bunch of pictures, and it was our goal to be able to afford a facility like that. We made it happen and then we moved out here.
Francis: What advice would you give to others looking to start a business?
Hamar: What I always tell people is that if you can find a good product, and you can provide it to someone at a good price, and you have good customer service, you’re going to be successful in whatever you do.
If you’re going to own your own business, the one thing that you have to realize is that every day when you wake up, you’re going to have to figure something out. You’re going to have some sort of problem that you’re going to have to come up with a solution for. And that’s just part of it, because at the end of the day, everything rides on your shoulders.
Bob Francis is business editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at bob.francis@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
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