In the quiet southeast reaches of Battle Ground, business is bustling for Trail Tech as the high-tech company prepares for a massive expansion.
Trail Tech, a fast-growing company that designs and builds a variety of digital gauges for motorcycles and off-road vehicles, just purchased a 2.91-acre parcel of land where a new 40,000-square-foot building will be erected in the next two years. The expansion will pave the way for Trail Tech to hire dozens of new employees in production and administrative positions over the next three years, said Garridan Robinett, the company’s marketing manager.
Construction is just getting started on the first phase of the expansion: a roughly 3,000-square-foot expansion of Trail Tech’s current building. And Robinett expects work to begin on the new building by the summer of 2016.
“Primarily, it’s going to be an expansion of production,” he said. “We need more room.”
Today, Trail Tech has about 50 employees, 30 more than it had two years ago. Officials with the city of Battle Ground anticipate the company’s workforce could more than double in the next three years.
“As small as we are, the name has a lot of brand recognition,” Robinett said. “It’s incredible, because we’ll walk through trade shows with Trail Tech shirts on, and it’s hard for us to make it through.”
In addition to gauges, Trail Tech also manufactures a variety of lights, kickstands and other parts for motorcycles. Most of its competition is in Europe, where Trail Tech sells its products directly to Austrian-based KTM, the largest motorcycle manufacturer on the continent.
“We’re in a niche industry, where there’s not a whole lot of people who make gauges,” Robinett said. “If one meter goes on every single bike that KTM makes, that’s a huge amount of volume for us.”
Geoff and Kelly Wotton, a pair of motorcycle and ATV enthusiasts who used to work for Hewlett Packard, launched the company 13 years ago. At the time, they set out designing and building speedometers for themselves and their friends, and they ran the company out of their garage for about five years.
The company’s aftermarket product line caters to trail riders. On that side of the business, Trail Tech’s main focus is on GPS-related gauges.
Some motorcycles don’t come with Trail Tech gauges. But often even when the bikes do feature the company’s products, riders decide to replace them with higher-end Trail Tech gauges instead, Robinett said.
“So, there’s a lot of bikes where we’re getting two sales,” he said.
In the last few years, Trail Tech has put more emphasis on tailoring its gauges specifically to fit the needs of motorcycle manufacturers, like KTM . Now, with numerous other contracts in development, the company is poised for rapid growth.
“We’re constantly getting new projects in the OEM (original equipment manufacturing) business where they’ll actually pay us to develop the gauge,” he said. “That business growth is really expanding.”
