Kimball Electronics Brand Guidelines: Organ Circuits From Jasper, Spun Off in 2014

Electronics for a piano and organ maker.

Kimball Electronics grew out of a furniture and piano business in southern Indiana. English Wikipedia says Arnold Habig founded The Jasper Corporation in Jasper, Indiana, in 1950 to make television cabinets and furniture, and that in 1959 Jasper bought the W. W. Kimball Company, the Chicago piano and organ maker founded in 1857, which was then close to insolvency. Kimball piano production moved to West Baden, Indiana, and by 1969, Wikipedia says, Kimball was again the world’s largest piano maker.

The electronics business began two years after that purchase. The company’s own history says the Jasper Electronics Manufacturing Company was founded in 1961 to make electronics for Kimball organs, “the beginning of Kimball Electronics,” and its Jasper plant is described as the original electronics manufacturing location, founded that year. In 1974, English Wikipedia says, the parent changed its name from Jasper to Kimball International, because the Kimball name was far better known, and in 1976 it went public.

Over the following decades the electronics unit moved from building parts for its parent’s instruments to building for other companies. The company’s timeline marks a first outside contract, the start of its industrial, automotive and medical work, and the last organ produced, as the business shifted fully to contract manufacturing; Wikipedia says the Kimball piano and organ business was discontinued in February 1996.

The parent kept a long reach into music in those years. English Wikipedia says Jasper bought the Austrian piano maker Bösendorfer in 1966, and that in its peak years in the 1960s and 1970s the Kimball subsidiary made some 100,000 pianos and organs a year. Bösendorfer was sold to Austrian buyers in 2002, after the Kimball instrument line had closed.

Spun off in 2014.

The decisive step came in 2014. The Dubois County Free Press reported that Kimball International completed the spin-off of its electronic manufacturing services business, newly named Kimball Electronics, Inc., at 5 p.m. Eastern time on 31 October 2014, distributing three Kimball Electronics shares for every four Kimball International shares. From 3 November 2014 Kimball Electronics traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol KE, while Kimball International kept its office and hospitality furniture brands. That furniture company was itself bought by HNI Corporation in 2023, English Wikipedia says.

As an independent company, Kimball Electronics describes its core as electronics manufacturing services — producing and testing printed circuit board assemblies and doing higher-level assembly of medical, automotive and industrial products — alongside a contract development and manufacturing business for medical disposables, drug-delivery devices and precision moulded plastics. It says it offers Class 7 and 8 clean-room assembly. Its Jasper plant lists products such as electronic power steering control modules, automotive sensors and cameras, motor controls and medical image processing equipment.

Its plants sit in several countries. The company lists facilities in Jasper and Indianapolis in Indiana, Laem Chabang in Thailand, Nanjing in China, Poznań in Poland, Reynosa in Mexico and Timișoara in Romania, with its world headquarters in Jasper. On 1 July 2026 it announced the acquisition of Helvoet Polymer Technologies, a contract development and manufacturing company based in Europe with operations in India, focused on microfluidics, diagnostics and drug delivery.

How the category presents itself.

Contract electronics makers build products that carry other companies’ names, so the pictures they show of themselves tend to be about process rather than product. The most common image is a green circuit board moving along a conveyor line, often photographed at an angle so the rows of components catch the light. Close behind come pick-and-place machines caught in motion, their heads blurred as they set parts onto the board, and macro close-ups of solder joints, shiny and precise.

People appear too, usually as operators at inspection stations or assembly benches. Many wear blue or grey static-control smocks, with caps or gloves where the work calls for them, and the photographs stress tidy workstations, labelled bins and bright, even lighting. Clean-room scenes, with full gowns and soft white light, tend to go with medical or optical work.

Outside the factory, the imagery turns to buildings: low white or grey plants with large windows and a sign on the facade, photographed under a clear sky, often with a map of sites worldwide nearby. Trade fairs supply the rest. Stands at shows such as productronica in Munich and IPC APEX EXPO in the United States give these companies a public face, with demonstration lines, sample boards and banners in their corporate colours.

The names themselves are usually set in plain, sturdy sans-serifs, with one strong corporate colour, often a blue or a green, carrying the identity. The guides that follow look at how individual makers fit, or depart from, that common picture, and at what can be checked about who founded them, who owns them and where they build.

Becoming Kimball Solutions.

The name is now changing. In early 2026 the Dubois County Free Press reported that Kimball Electronics, marking 65 years, intended to rebrand as Kimball Solutions in a phased rollout beginning in July 2026, and that the parent company intended to change its name to Kimball Solutions, Inc., subject to approval by its share owners. The same report covered the opening of a new medical manufacturing facility in Indianapolis. The company gives three reasons for the new name: a broader range of services beyond electronics, a spread of work across medical, industrial and automotive markets, and a focus on problem-solving partnerships with customers. It says customers, suppliers and partners should see no disruption to operations or contracts during the change.

In July 2026 the paper reported that the first phase was complete: the Jasper and Indianapolis sites took the Kimball Solutions name on 1 July 2026. Chief executive Richard D. Phillips said the new name better represented a company moving from traditional electronics manufacturing towards wider engineering and manufacturing services. The China and Mexico sites were expected to follow in January 2027 and the Poland, Romania and Thailand sites in July 2027, with the corporate name change targeted for 1 July 2027; the former Helvoet sites in Tilburg and Pune were also to take the new name over time. At the time of writing the listed company still trades as Kimball Electronics, and its website already carries the Kimball Solutions name in places.

For a design guide, Kimball Electronics shows a company outgrowing the word that has defined it since 1961, while keeping the family name it inherited from a piano maker. Compare Benchmark Electronics, which also began inside a larger parent, and Plexus, another Midwestern contract manufacturer. For this guide we use deep teal, amber and ivory with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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