A 35-year-old Colorado company that develops and manufactures medical products for clients worldwide is expanding its operation and moving into a 34,000-square-foot facility in Arvada.
ERI Group, formerly Evergreen Research, has leased the new manufacturing space and expects it to be up and running later this year. The company, whose main site is in Genesee, has doubled its workforce over the past year to about 100 employees and anticipates the staff growing to roughly 150 by the end of 2025.
“The addition of the Arvada office provides significant expansion to our manufacturing operations,” said Natasha Bond, president of ERI Group. “This is an investment to make the operations more efficient and really set the group up for success.”
The core of the company’s business involves the design and development of medical products. ERI also provides quality assurance and regulatory services.
“We also do diagnostic equipment, some laboratory equipment. And we actually do some environmental-monitoring equipment and high-end sports equipment,” Bond said.
The company’s mission is to enable entrepreneurs “to bring life-changing products to market,” Bond added.
The ERI Group’s clients include the creators of LUCI, smart wheelchair technology. Barry Dean and his brother, Jered Dean, a former Colorado School of Mines professor, started a company after designing and engineering features for a wheelchair used by Barry’s daughter to make it safer and able to connect to the internet.
The work on LUCI is a good example of what makes the ERI team special, said Bond, who joined the company two years ago.
“We helped them the first time around. They went out to the market and had some success. They came back with market feedback and wanted additional features,” Bond said. “We brought it in for about a month of really intensive work and brought the LUCI team to take a look at some of the options we put together, of where we might take the product for them.”
The ERI Group doesn’t create its own products.
“We are a service company. We develop and manufacture our customers’ products,” Bond said. “We are effectively a team of experts that somebody can wrap around a good idea to help it forward.”
The business became ERI Group two years ago when the former owners retired. The company is now backed by private equity that is Denver-based, Bond said. The company has seen business grow while maintaining longtime clients, including customers No. 1, 2 and 4 from 35 years ago, she added.
Daniel Brenner, Special to the Denver Post
Former Lockheed Martin engineer Jered Dean presents first-of-its-kind hardware and software LUCI Dec. 8, 2020 at the Research and Design warehouse in Arvada.
In 2022, ERI merged with LINK Product Development, a Denver-based industrial design and engineering studio.
About 75% of ERI Group’s clients are in the U.S. Others are in Mexico, Canada, Israel. New Zealand and Europe. Bond said the work ranges from putting in millions of dollars worth of effort into one project while providing a few hours of help for another with meeting regulatory requirements.
“We probably have a hundred projects open at any one time,” Bond said.
She said Colorado is the perfect setting for ERI Group. The company’s staff has expertise in mechanical, electrical, software and systems engineering as well as quality-assurance and regulatory consulting services.
The value of the availability in Colorado of highly skilled, highly motivated team members “who, frankly, are an absolute joy to work with can’t be overstated,” Bond said.
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