Crestron Brand Guidelines: The 1972 Cresskill Control Maker, Now in Rockleigh

An engineer, a small room and a slide-projector remote.

Crestron is a privately held American maker of control and automation systems, headquartered in Rockleigh, New Jersey. The company dates its start to 1972, when, it says, the engineer George Feldstein began the business in a room over a delicatessen in Cresskill, New Jersey; NJB Magazine, in a profile published in December 2015, placed the start in the basement of his Cresskill home. Both accounts agree that the business was incorporated as Crestron Electronics in 1975, and the magazine gives the month as May. Feldstein held bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from New York University, the magazine said, and more than 70 patents.

The early work was control. English Wikipedia says one of the first jobs was powder-dispensing equipment for Colgate-Palmolive’s detergent boxes. NJB Magazine listed a remote for 35mm slide projectors and window drapes among the first products, and the company’s own fiftieth-anniversary history describes its first big step into audiovisual work as control for slide projectors: fades, dissolves and timed presentations running several projectors at once. English Wikipedia today describes the business as control, automation and integration technology.

Growth stayed in northern New Jersey. The company built its first dedicated headquarters in Cresskill in 1980 and moved to Rockleigh in 1997, where it bought further buildings for a research centre that NJB Magazine said housed more than 400 engineers. In 2009 it opened an 8,000-square-foot “Experience Center” in New Jersey, and in May 2022 it opened the George Feldstein Technology Center in Rockleigh as its engineering base, according to English Wikipedia citing the trade magazine CE Pro.

Panels, processors and a factory in Orangeburg.

Crestron sells into two worlds. English Wikipedia describes commercial audiovisual spaces — meeting rooms, conference rooms, classrooms and auditoriums — alongside high-end homes. On the residential side, Crestron Home is an operating system for houses, hospitality, boats and multi-dwelling buildings; on the commercial side, Crestron Flex brings video conferencing, wireless presentation and room control together, and XiO Cloud is its software for managing devices remotely, the encyclopedia says. In 2015 NJB Magazine listed integrated systems for audio and video distribution, lighting, heating and air conditioning, home theatre, intercom and video security.

The company’s own history makes claims of firsts: it says it released the first colour touchscreen with a video window shortly after 1990, and that its control system was the first to include an Ethernet port. Its touch panels and control processors reach buyers mostly through installers. NJB Magazine counted more than 15,000 independent partners and dealers in 2015, and the company has trained and certified programmers since 1998, a scheme that grew into the Crestron Masters programme — in 2001 according to English Wikipedia, in 2002 according to the company.

Where the hardware is made is documented. In August 2019 the trade site Strata-gee toured a Crestron factory in Orangeburg, New York, a few miles from the New Jersey campus: about 90,000 square feet with 16 manufacturing departments, where surface-mount machines place components onto circuit boards that are then built into finished products on two dozen top-level assembly lines, beside a staging area that builds and provisions systems for large enterprise projects. American Builders Quarterly reported in 2019 that Crestron had brought manufacturing and supply-chain work from three New Jersey locations into the 200,000-square-foot Orangeburg site, about half of it manufacturing, and had opened a distribution centre in Euless, Texas. Strata-gee also described computer-controlled shaker tables that imitate the vibration of shipping, environmental chambers for testing, a machine that measures incoming parts, and a service department that repairs both residential and commercial products; it said every product passes through between 12 and 30 separate checks before it leaves.

The room behind the meeting.

Conference-room and pro AV makers sell a room more than a gadget. Their catalogues and websites tend to show the same scene: a meeting table, a large display on the wall, a slim video bar mounted under the screen, microphones set into the ceiling, and a small touch panel on the table that starts the call, dims the lights and switches the source. The equipment that makes the room work is usually out of sight, in a rack in a cupboard or above the ceiling tiles.

That hidden layer is where much of the industry’s engineering sits: control processors, signal switchers and extenders, amplifiers and digital signal processors that shape the audio of a room. These are boxes with plain faceplates and model numbers rather than consumer-style names, and their brands live on the label, the rack ear and the software screen an installer sees when setting up a system.

Most of these products do not reach buyers off a shelf. They are specified and wired in by systems integrators and installers working for companies, universities, schools and public bodies, and many makers run their own training and certification programmes for those partners. The trade gathers at fairs such as InfoComm in the United States and Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), where new panels, cameras and processors are shown on stands built to look like finished meeting rooms.

For a design guide, the category shows identity working at two scales: a calm, uncluttered room for the people who use it, and a dense, technical system of labels, connectors and part numbers for the people who build it. The makers in this guide are set out with what can be checked about who founded them, who owns them and where their products are made.

A family company at fifty.

Crestron describes itself as a family business. NJB Magazine reported that Randy Klein, a long-time vice-president, became chief executive in March 2014; when Klein retired in December 2021, the founder’s son Dan Feldstein became chief executive and president, English Wikipedia says, citing Forbes. In November 2015 George Feldstein was inducted into the Consumer Technology Association’s CE Hall of Fame, NJB Magazine reported.

The company has grown through partnerships and a purchase. English Wikipedia records a partnership with the camera maker Huddly in 2017, partnerships with Shure and Jabra in 2021, and the acquisition of the video technology company 1 Beyond in 2022, the last reported at the time by AV Network. In 2015 NJB Magazine put the workforce at about 3,000 people and the office count at 91; when it marked fifty years in 2022, the company said it had more than 90 offices worldwide.

For a design guide, Crestron shows how a maker of control systems builds a name on the panel people touch and the processor in the rack that few of them see. Compare Extron, the Anaheim maker of signal switching and control equipment, and Shure, a Crestron partner since 2021. For this guide we use a deep navy, a slate grey and a cool silver with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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