Lehigh Valley Rising: The Best Of

A region revitalized, a region reimagined, striving, thriving, innovating, collaborating, elevating and accelerating.

The Greater Lehigh Valley is home to businesses that are booming and game-changers that are forging the future.

This is Lehigh Valley Rising.

BSI Corporate Benefits is a proud supporter of Lehigh Valley Rising.

Additional support provided by Adam's outdoor advertising.

- The population of the Lehigh Valley has been growing for some time.

Today, more than 850,000 people call the Valley home.

Each of us helps make the Lehigh Valley unique.

On this edition of Lehigh Valley Rising, we're revisiting some of our most recent work about the region's people and businesses.

In honor of Black History Month, we focused on three remarkable and diverse companies and their leaders, who are as inspirational as they are successful.

- When we say marketing and development, we don't see a difference.

The marketing aspect - if I talked about the logo that people are creating, there's a story behind it.

If I talk about a website, there's a story that you're telling.

For us, that's all part of the development as well.

How are you developing your tools, your skills, your knowledge of the community around you so that when you're writing something on your website or you're creating a logo, you're keeping those folks in mind, right?

- Basically, what we saw was a market gap and an opportunity to create a firm that was going to really be able to really work on the entire ecosystem of a corporation from business strategies, marketing strategies, PR strategies.

- So some of the services we offer, in addition to building websites, logos, creating campaigns to tell stories, is diversity education, business consultation and really personal development and personnel development.

Because we really, truly believe that even in that space, communication, diversity go hand in hand.

So when we talk about the nuts from A to Z as an organization, we truly believe that it's all part of the same alphabet.

- The work that we're doing, we can't do it without community.

As black men, we have a responsibility that's on our shoulders to always kind of put our best foot forward.

And when we're thinking about community, this is where we come from.

- It's the sixth mass shooting in California in less than two weeks.

- Covid-19.

- The death toll is expected to keep rising.

- So, mental health is a major issue that's plaguing the entire country.

But we're also one step away from needing mental health services.

If we can remove the stigma and we can educate people, it's going to go a long way in solving a lot of different problems.

- Preventive Measures is an outpatient mental health and home health provider.

We provide services in Pennsylvania, Washington DC and Georgia.

Collectively, we have about 3,000 clients or so, and we provide therapy services, psychiatric services, medication management, and also in-home care for seniors and other individuals needing additional support in the home.

At Preventive Measures, we meet you where you are.

- Preventive Measures was really the vision of Dwayne Jones.

- I am the president and CEO of Preventive Measures.

Allentown is home.

I grew up on Second Street in the '70s.

This is the house I was raised in.

The barbershop reflected your community.

- In communities of color, the barbershop is therapy, right?

The barbershop is the place where you can feel you can be vulnerable or you can express yourself, or you can just be who you are.

- I loved being a barber.

But I realized that that same feeling of making people feel better about themselves was in the mental health practice.

First of all, mental health, that was a taboo to even talk about in our community, and then to own a mental health clinic... That was just unheard of.

- People need vaccines that are readily accessible, that have long storage times, that are easy to administer, to take, that have a long efficacy, a long effective date, a long shelf life, and aren't invasive.

I mean, the biggest thing is no-one likes getting stabbed with a needle to get a vaccine.

Yeah, you can do it.

But, you know, not everyone likes it.

So we created an oral vaccine platform called QNDER.

It's a kinder way to vaccinate.

We moved into this 41,000 square foot building out of Ben Franklin Tech Ventures.

We started at Ben Franklin in a single lab, and our clean room was about 600 square feet.

This room around us was the entire size of our original clean room.

It was a great move.

It allowed us to expand our customer base.

We could handle larger projects and that spurred our growth.

We can hire more people.

But we do have to refit the building and bring it up to what we consider the gold standard.

At USSF, everyone working here, they see and hear from our customers the direct impact they have on having better outcomes for people needing the medicines that we make.

- We get letters from doctors and patients saying, I haven't been able to get this for years.

Thank you so much for making this for us.

- This is a challenging field, a challenging segment.

And it takes desire and commitment to complete the test that we have.

- Our next few stories highlight women-owned businesses which solve problems creatively and make a real contribution to the Lehigh Valley and beyond.

- Vegan Treats is a bakery, but we're actually the first vegan bakery to ever exist anywhere in the world.

- I'd say the vibe of Vegan Treats is hip, upscale, definitely trendy, but not in a flash fashion kind of way.

Obviously, plant-based lifestyles and diets have been catching on.

- My inspiration for Vegan Treats was to satisfy my own sweet tooth.

I went vegan on a whim and within 24 hours I craved dessert, and at the time no vegan desserts existed.

So I put it into my own hands and figured it out and basically didn't stop until I started making amazing vegan treats.

When I first started experimenting in my home kitchen, it quickly moved to a bakery down the street, and that was in about 1998.

That was only wholesale.

So I started baking for a restaurant in New York City, and within a few months of that first endeavor, the New York Times started calling.

And I was like, Oh, my God.

What is happening?

Before you know it, I was delivering to, you know, 30 or 40 restaurants in New York City, in Philadelphia.

For the first ten years of this company, it was my mom baking everything and me decorating.

And it wasn't until we opened this first retail store in 2004 that I got my first employee, and now we have 70.

I'm always grateful when there's any press about the bakery.

It's always really cool when, like, BBC World News is calling you to talk about your chocolate box or to have like a three-page colored spread in the Washington Post and they've never featured anything vegan.

Like, it definitely feels like something I'm really proud of and that the hard work has paid off.

- There's people who spend $500, $600 on just chocolates.

- We do have a lot of celebrity clients and it's really cool.

- Most recently, we had The Weeknd get some desserts from us.

- I love Jon and Tracey Stewart.

We send out Christmas treats for them every year and they're really close friends.

But truly my favorite I've ever baked for was Jane Goodall.

I feel like I've modeled my life after her and she's been such an inspiration, so that was really cool.

- With our shipping, we actually get some really big orders for that.

New Zealand.

Australia, Finland, Japan, Russia, UK.

Canada loves Vegan Treats.

- Yeah.

We have a lot of like high profile clients, which is cool, but ultimately I feel like my favorite client is that we're saving animals worldwide.

That to me is like what really matters.

- Welcome to GGL Creative.

We're coming to you from our studio in Pennsylvania.

Gifts for the Good Life specializes in client gift experiences.

We are a creative agency.

- We do everything from mailers to gifting onsite gifting experiences for pop-ups, for large corporations.

What we do is create experiences.

We work with Target.

We work with Coca-Cola.

We work with College Football Playoffs and NASCAR.

Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings.

A lot of properties, like Sandals and Beaches and Hilton.

And then we do some charity work where we've worked with a corporation or a company called Dazzle Africa.

- IMDB and other production companies.

- One of my favorite projects has been the work that we've done for Target in their partnership with St Jude.

We created three different projects of gifting, gifting all of the families and the patients that are there at that particular time, which is about 260 families.

And it's just meant to brighten their day.

Here we are with Nate, who's our engineer here at GGL, and our third partner.

And he's making a platform so that everything in this box sits perfectly, especially during transit.

I feel like we do our best work when our clients trust us.

So if they're creative and they have a vision and they're looking to do something a little bit different than what everybody else is doing, that's really where we like to live.

- My Sister's Closet is a women's resale boutique.

We accept donations of gently used women's clothing that's in style.

And then we sort through it and prepare it for sale, with all the proceeds going back into our program to survivors of sex trafficking and exploitation.

Well, human trafficking is the sale of another individual.

It's modern day slavery.

- When people hear that these things are happening, it's hard for them to believe.

But it is.

You know, we have all the roads coming through here, 33, 78, and you've got New York City not far away, the Poconos, Philadelphia...

Even Washington DC is not far from here.

So it is happening.

I mean, I live in Bethlehem and I know it's happening right down the street.

- Bloom taught me I'm worth more than where I was.

I know what it feels like to start in this program.

I feel like it's a calling to tell these ladies, like, You can absolutely do this.

There is nothing stopping you.

- Bloom for Women's mission is to provide sanctuary and a continuum of care to heal, empower and employ women survivors of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation.

- And we liked that it represented flowers, new life and kind of an unfolding.

We believe it's what happens to a woman's life when she comes to our program.

We currently employ two of our participants at My Sister's Closet, and it's a great place for them to build their retail experience.

It's also a great way for us to engage with volunteers in our community.

We have about 30 volunteers that help My Sister's Closet be what it is.

- So we really, really wanted to be able to hire our participants, because we know that if they come to us and they're able to get a safe job and if they can stay with us, then they're going to stay longer and they're going to do better.

- I'm a costume designer.

I am 91 years old.

I was born in Hanover, the home of six pretzel factories.

I went to school in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Tech.

It's now Carnegie Mellon - more stylish.

I went to work for Irene Sharaff, one of the greatest costume designers ever, ever, ever.

She said, I'm going to California to do Brigadoon.

Would you like to come and be one of my assistants?

That paid $54 a week.

- I'm walking here!

I'm walking here!

- When I did Midnight Cowboy, Dustin Hoffman was playing Ratso Rizzo, this grungy guy who slept on pool tables and hadn't had a bath in two weeks.

And I grabbed a dark red suit.

I threw in the Clorox and it came out the color that won an Academy Award.

- Hey, that's all I got.

- Ann taught me how to age a garment.

You don't just throw mud at it.

You have to think about what happened to this garment.

What did the character do in it?

And I have become apparently some expert in the business of aging clothes.

If you mention my name to people, Oh, he's the ager dyer!

- We had frayed here and spots.

Everything about it was something that a guy who slept on pool tabletops and just a rotten life would have.

- Hey, hey, wait up!

- You keep away!

- I do not work with movie stars.

I work with actors who have the skill to create another character.

- Ann designs characters.

She serves the whole of a film.

She serves the story, above all.

It's a beautiful process.

It's one unique to her in my experience.

I come in Meryl Streep and I go out... ..the character.

Do you have the papers?

- Not yet.

- I'm very snotty about perfect.

I want it perfect.

- People have lived in the Lehigh Valley for thousands of years.

Many of our European ancestors arrived here in the late 1600s.

One of those new arrivals, a clockmaker from Switzerland, established a shop in Easton that's older than the nation itself.

A few years later, a German fellow pulled into Nazareth and made a musical instrument that became inseparable from American culture.

And about 100 years later, a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant changed Easter baskets forever.

And we can't forget the hospital with the oldest consecutively running nursing school in the nation.

Here are four businesses that have passed the century mark.

- We carry karat gold, diamonds, fashion jewelry, yellow gold, white gold, rose gold.

We have sterling silver jewelry, gemstone jewelry.

- Welcome to Bixler's.

I'm Perry Sporn.

We're proud that every item in our store is handmade.

I'm the owner of Bixler's and I actually started in the jewelry business to pay my way through college.

I acquired the company about six years ago when I met Joyce Welken, who is a Bixler family member.

- Christian Bixler was my great great great grandfather who started Bixler's Jewelers in Easton in 1785.

I'm most proud of the fact that my family's been able to carry on the Bixler tradition for 238 years, and we'll hope it goes another 238 with Perry involved.

- The founder, Christian Bixler III, was a Swiss clockmaker and metal smith.

He was a Revolutionary War soldier, and he moved from Redding to Easton in 1784.

- He had a little stone building on the corner of Bank and Northampton Street in Easton, and he had his shop and his house in the back.

He made approximately 465 tall case clocks, but many of the clocks are still in existence.

I have two.

My brother has four.

But there are many throughout the US, actually.

- He bought the land for the first workshop from William Penn's son and we still have all of the history of the company.

We have the drawings to the first clocks, we have the logbooks and the ledgers from the first customers he ever sold to.

- We've been in business for over 200 years, so we're obviously doing something right, and we really try to roll out the red carpet to our customers.

- Just Born is a third-generation, family-owned candy company that's celebrating 100 years in 2023.

- Random Acts of Sweetness is a great way for us to celebrate our 100th anniversary.

We're taking the Peepsobile out.

We're taking the Peeps chick mascot out, and we're going to the community to celebrate lots of sweet little things that are every day.

- We're a family-owned company, and all of us are treated like one big family here at Just Born.

Sam Born, our founder, he grew up in Russia, actually modern-day Ukraine.

He was looking to get away from the czar's army and escape the country, went to Czechoslovakia, and eventually made his way to Paris, where he got a job in a chocolate shop.

And from there, he emigrated over to the United States and ultimately opened up a little candy shop, a little factory in the back in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York, where he used to put a sign in the window that the candy is so fresh, it's as if it's just born that day.

Sam brought his brother-in-laws into the business, Irv and Jack Shaffer, and eventually they really wanted to expand.

But as you can imagine, a little expensive to do that in New York City.

And so they actually came across Bethlehem.

It was a great place.

Bethlehem Steel is here.

There was a lot of labor.

They knew they could expand here.

And then actually they found a building at auction, which is the very building we're sitting in.

We're here in the Mike and Ike and Hot Tamales packaging area.

It typically takes three to four days to make a Mike and Ike or Hot Tamale.

In the 1940, we actually launched Mike and Ike, 1950, Hot Tamales.

The Shaffers and the Borns were looking for the next best thing.

They actually stumbled upon the Rodda Candy Company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

They went to acquire this candy business, and while they were on tour there, in the back room, there was all these women with pastry tubes just squirting out these little quirky little marshmallow birds.

And that's when Peeps really took off.

- People do so many other things with them, and that's what we call Peepsonality, where people make arts and crafts with Peeps, they make recipes... - The most ridiculous cookie bars ever.

- And don't forget to garnish with an extra Peep.

- And as we celebrate our 100 years, we're doing a lot of events focused on the folks that got us to where we are.

And that's our associates, that's our stakeholders and, of course, that is our communities.

- My grandfather used to say, We're mechanics.

We take a tree and transform it into a guitar that a guitar player can use to make great music.

You know how I'm going to sell you a Martin guitar?

I'm going to take you on a tour of the Martin Guitar factory.

- Welcome to the Martin Guitar factory here in Nazareth, Pennsylvania.

- Christian Martin really invented the acoustic guitar, as we know the acoustic guitar now.

- The majority of the demand was for Spanish classical guitars.

Where they were being made at that time was in Cadiz, where it was very hot and humid all year.

And if you send a guitar like that to New York or Boston in the winter, it can crack.

So he began to copy them, and that was the beginning of him creating the Martin brand by saying, I'm going to make a more durable version of the guitar that you're already familiar with.

And he and his heirs did that all the way up until really the 1920s, when we fairly rapidly moved away from gut string to steel string.

And that's the point we're talking about an American invention.

- So many people refer to it as the Mecca of guitar making because there is that history.

- We employ 500 people here and 500 people at our facility in Navajo.

- Here in Nazareth, we produce almost 200 guitars per day on average.

We also know that the consumers, they have become more diverse and broader.

For example, as part of the Covid pandemic, we saw a significant demand for guitars.

50% of new buyers of guitars were females.

What connects a lot of people that love Martin with us is actually the experience and the love for creativity - what we call unleash the artist within.

- How has St Luke's lasted 150 years?

Lots of places haven't.

They've become obsolete for one reason or another.

And not only are we not obsolete, I think we're right there at the cutting edge.

- Right after the Civil War, Lehigh Valley made a major transformation from being a basic rural area to an industrial hub.

- We had railroads, we had mines.

- A company which later became Bethlehem Steel, cement companies, and also companies that produced explosives.

- Fire!

- When you look at all of these companies, one of the things that was very much in common, because there were very few safety measures, is that there were a number of employee injuries.

Employees who were injured had to be taken as far away as Philadelphia or New York in order to get treatment.

- Our valley needed a trauma facility.

- St Luke's has been a part of many, many advances throughout the 150 years that it's been over here.

It now has resulted in the only four-year medical school in the area.

- We signed the papers in 2010 to have a regional medical school in conjunction with Temple.

- We started the school in a very modest way with 30 students per year.

We now are up to 40 students per year.

- We have it limited to 40 people to offer a premier type of education to these individuals, that we want to see people who are hopefully going to stay in our community.

- Students live in the Lehigh Valley.

They train in the Lehigh Valley.

Over half of the graduates of our medical school select St Luke's to practice their residencies.

- And so, therefore, they are much more likely to stay here with us.

- Well, that's our show.

You can find this and every other episode of Lehigh Valley Rising on our website... From all of us, I'm Grover Silcox.

See you next time.

- BSI Corporate Benefits is a proud supporter of Lehigh Valley Rising.