East Penn Brand Guidelines: A 1946 Creamery Start, the Deka Name and Lyon Station

A father, a son and rebuilt batteries after the war.

East Penn Manufacturing began in 1946 in Berks County, Pennsylvania. According to its entry in Gale’s International Directory of Company Histories (2006), it was founded by DeLight E. Breidegam Jr., who had just come home from the Air Force, and his father, DeLight R. Breidegam Sr., who had worked in management at two local battery firms, Bowers Battery Company and Price Battery. They rented a former creamery in the village of Bowers, and because the military had taken so many raw materials during the war, they began by rebuilding used car batteries rather than making new ones. The company tells the same story on its own website, describing a one-room creamery and rebuilt batteries for returning GIs who needed their vehicles running again.

In 1947 the Breidegams took on a partner, Karl Gasche, an MIT-trained engineer from Bowers Battery, and the business was incorporated as East Penn Manufacturing Company, Gale says. With raw materials available again, it began to make new automobile batteries. The brand name the partners coined, Deka, joins “DeLight” and “Karl”; Gale notes that it was first pronounced with a long “e.” The first line had five automotive batteries, the top of the range labelled Deka Precision Built. Two other brands, Berco and Hillcrest, did not last. Gasche stayed on as vice president until he retired in 1966, the company says.

The partners built a small lead smelter on an 11-acre plot outside Lyons, and by 1950 the firm had left the creamery for a manufacturing building on that site, Gale records. That plot became the company’s home at Lyon Station, where Gale described about two million square feet of operations on nearly 500 acres by the mid-2000s. East Penn still gives Lyon Station as its base and describes itself as privately held and family-owned, with a fourth generation of the family now working in the business.

From car batteries to forklifts, telecom racks and lithium.

For its first two decades East Penn was an automotive battery maker that spread across the mid-Atlantic, with branch offices, warehouses and, from 1954, a Florida finishing operation called Federal Battery, according to Gale. Its work for Sears, Roebuck & Co. pushed it into plastics, cables and wire in the 1960s; Gale credits East Penn with the industry’s first lead battery terminal, introduced in 1967. The Lynx line of battery accessories followed in 1976, the year the company first made more than a million batteries.

The industrial side began in 1968, with a line of batteries for lift trucks, personnel movers, diesel locomotives and aircraft push-out vehicles; mining batteries were already an important business by then, Gale says. Through the 1980s its engineers worked on absorbed-glass-mat and gelled-electrolyte non-spillable batteries suited to telecommunications. The Deka Dominator gel battery arrived in 1990, solar batteries in 1992 became the base of a stationary battery division, and standby lines for telephone networks, UPS systems and cable television followed, with a new specialty battery plant opened in 1995.

Growth also came by acquisition. Gale lists warehouse and distribution firms bought in Kentucky, the Midwest and Ontario, a 2003 joint venture with the Austrian battery maker Banner, and the 2005 purchase of the automotive battery division of Douglas Battery Manufacturing, which added a plant in North Carolina. In August 2019 East Penn bought a majority interest in Navitas Systems, a maker of large-format lithium batteries for heavy-duty industrial, government and defence uses, whose research and manufacturing stayed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Pennsylvania Business Report said.

Today the company sorts its products into four divisions: transportation, motive power, reserve power, and wire, cable and battery accessories. Its careers pages list sites in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Texas, Utah, North Carolina and Michigan.

Cells, trays and racks.

Industrial batteries are rarely seen by the people who depend on them. They sit under the seat of a forklift truck, in a locked room behind a telephone exchange or in the cabinets that keep a data centre running when the mains fail, so the makers in this guide have to show their products in places most readers will never visit.

Their pictures tend to come from a small set of scenes. There are rows of cells on a factory floor, forklift batteries packed into steel trays, standby racks lined up in data centres and telecom rooms, and cutaway diagrams that open a cell to show its plates, separators and chemistry. Newer lithium makers add architects’ renderings of large cell factories, and the oldest firms reach back to photographs of early lead and nickel works and to the railway, telephone and submarine customers they first supplied.

The trade is also a story of ownership. Many of these names have passed through electrical groups, private equity funds, stock markets and energy companies, and several survive mainly as brands inside larger groups. Regulators have looked at the trade too: in 2017 Germany’s competition authority fined two makers of industrial batteries over a shared lead surcharge, and a French heritage inventory has recorded one maker’s Bordeaux factory buildings as industrial architecture.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its batteries are made and which product names it uses — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The colours and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not official brand assets.

A brand made from two first names.

The most durable piece of East Penn’s identity is a name rather than a picture. Deka is a blend of two partners’ first names, DeLight and Karl, and it has outlasted the company’s other early brands by more than seven decades. East Penn keeps the two apart in a simple way: the company name stands on its corporate site and history pages, while the Deka name goes on the batteries, which Gale described in 2006 as covering cars, trucks, boats, farm equipment and industrial uses. The company says new Deka products still reach the market every year.

Its own story is told as a family history. The website opens with the creamery in Bowers and the rebuilt batteries of 1946, and says the company has grown from five automotive batteries to more than 10,500 full-time employees and 515 product designs. East Penn describes itself as the second-largest producer of lead batteries in North America. Outside recognition has often been about the workplace: in 2005 Fortune ranked East Penn 79th on its list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, Gale noted, and the directory singled out a workforce with many tenures of twenty and thirty years.

For a design guide, East Penn shows how a family-owned maker can carry one coined name from rebuilt car batteries in a creamery to lift-truck batteries, standby racks and lithium packs. Compare Exide, another long-established lead battery name, and Trojan Battery, a deep-cycle maker founded in Los Angeles in 1925. For this guide we use a deep navy, a warm amber and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep East Penn’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.