Pride Mobility completes move into state of the art building

DURYEA – Pride Mobility, working out of an unassuming store at 71 S. Main St. in downtown Pittston in 1986, is now the industry leader in mobility products that aid the disabled, the infirm and the elderly improving lives all over the world.

Initially, Pride was only manufacturing lift chairs becoming a leader industry wide until 1992 when it expanded into the scooter business. Within four years, Pride was the topping the scooter market and by 1998, Pride began to ship products worldwide.

When Chairman and CEO Scott Meuser and his family joined forces with the Kretchik family back in 1986, he could have never envisioned taking the business from its humble beginning to today’s domination.

In 1995, Pride moved from Pittston to Exeter into a 150,000-square-foot building equipped for management space, to research and development, to manufacturing, to warehousing and finally shipping.

“That was a huge step up from 71 S. Main St.,” Meuser recalled, when moving the operations from Pittston to Exeter. “Everybody else was thrilled, all I saw was how much more money was costing us.”

The move to Exeter paid off and enabled Pride to make a huge leap industry wide around the world.

Busting at the seams at their Exeter plant, the need to find a larger structure was a necessity. The former Topps Chewing Gum manufacturing plant in Duryea was available and purchased in 2003.

In addition to utilizing the Duryea facility for Pride, they leased out space to Topps as well as neighboring business Schott Glass.

Eventually, the decision was made to move the entire operation out of Exeter and into the Duryea site.

“We should get the benefits of this (building) for decades,” Meuser said. “The collaboration, the efficiency – we were spending a ton of money bringing product back and forth from Exeter and that’s all gone now.”

The Duryea campus currently houses a state-of-the-art, 400,000-square-foot building combined with a newly built 100,000-square-foot warehouse in 2019 on nearly 50 acres of land.

The Duryea plant had to be retrofitted for Pride’s needs and according to Meuser two-thirds of the building was transformed into the present configuration.

“We did renovate most of it for our purposes but left some it sort of the way it was,” Meuser added. “Our architects came in and redesigned the whole place and then got interrupted when COVID happened and then had problems with the supply chain slowing the progress.”

Meuser said Pride eventually took over the entire building and made the complete move out of Exeter in this year.

When the pandemic started people began working from home, so remodeling and retooling the plant was made easier with employees out of the building.

“The production area hasn’t changed and some offices haven’t changed,” Meuser said, since Pride took over the Topps building. “In fact, we have to figure out how we have to spruce up those offices up a little bit.”

What was completed prior to the pandemic in March of 2020 was the 100,000-square-foot warehouse built onsite.

At Duryea, with room to breathe, all departments’ physical layouts were expanded including the manufacturer’s research and research and development area.

R&D is critical to the company’s brand where all scooters and prototypes are exposed to rigorous testing before they can go out to market.

At the test lab, an 11,000-square-foot area, each prototype tested is compliant with the Food and Drug Administration standards as well as Pride’s own in-house testing criteria.

Chairs are ramp tested; curb-climbing tested, water tested, stability tested, surfacing tested and road tested, all done at R&D. There is an outdoor course being constructed around the plant for real-life situations.

The Quantum fabrication area is large enough to manufacture parts in-house instead of outsourcing, saving the company money and valuable time.

“We are running two-shifts in here (fabrication),” Joe O’Brien, Quantum Operations senior vice president, said. “We got allocated the capital to start this five or six years ago, so myself and one of the manufacturing engineers got acclimated to equipment and got a bunch of smart people in here to run it, and if we hadn’t done it at the beginning of the pandemic, we would have been in serious trouble supply chain wise.”

According to O’Brien, Quantum, the division where scooters are put together, has two production sites, the one at Duryea and one at Las Vegas, Nevadad.

Scooters and lift chairs are manufactured at a third plant in Mississippi.

The Quantum production area resembles an automobile assembly plant were each chair is made to order just like you would do when you order a vehicle.

Two areas of the facility commonly used by employees are the cafeteria and state-of-the-art gym.

The largest area that is lined with windows floor to ceiling can be used by employees to dine for lunch or can be utilized for a sizeable gathering; such as they recently did for the Pride Christmas party for employees and their families.

The fitness center for employees houses all types of equipment that you’d find in the best exercise facilities in the area. The bathrooms off of the gym area are complete with lockers and a shower.

Meuser’s theory: keep employees happy.

“Attracting talent these days is incredibly tough and keeping talent,” Meuser said. “The idea of this place (gym), we’ve got a great team, we want to make them happy, and enthusiastic employees create enthusiastic customers and we want them to stay here.”

According to Denise Truesdale, a 20-year Pride employee and human resources senior vice president, said employees were surveyed to see what equipment they would like to utilize at the gym.

“A walking trail was also created for employees to use outside the building,” Truesdale added. “Scott wanted the employees to enjoy the natural setting outdoors on campus.”

Meuser said coming out of the pandemic, many employers offered work remotely from home, and Pride was no different.

With the pandemic slowing, businesses are asking employees to return to the office, whereas Pride is taking a different approach.

“We offer remote too, but we are going to be more of a hybrid model, we want them coming in, but some said they wanted to work remote, but when they see the new building, they don’t mind coming in,” Meuser explained.

Truesdale said during the pandemic, certain employees had to be in the building but most office workers did work remotely from home.

With the transition to the Duryea campus complete, Pride redesigned their logo and gave their product line a refresh including changing the company color from red to sugar plum.

Meuser feels with the new facility now in place and with the company rejuvenated, Pride is ready to move forward for the next several decades.

Pride employs approximately 700 locally and as many as 1,300 worldwide.

If you are interested in working at Pride Mobility at any of their three locations in the U.S., point your browser to https://tinyurl.com/54scm8fp to see if can be a part of the team.