Lakeland Industries Brand Guidelines: A 1982 Ronkonkoma Suit Maker Turned Fire + Safety

A Long Island start-up built on disposable suits.

Lakeland Industries was incorporated in New York in 1982, in Ronkonkoma on Long Island. According to the company history in the International Directory of Company Histories, it was co-founded by Raymond J. Smith, who became its chairman and chief executive, and the attorney Patrick Murphy, who assembled a group of early investors. Smith already knew the trade. With a partner he had formed a Long Island firm, Disposables Inc., later renamed Abanda, and the same history says that in 1966 he became the first person to sell garments made of Tyvek, the bonded synthetic sheet that DuPont had introduced, after DuPont granted marketing rights.

When that partnership ended in 1982, Smith set up on his own. The directory says he took the name from a street sign for Lakeland Avenue, briefly considered “Lakeland Manufacturing,” and settled on Lakeland Industries. Former salespeople and his old head of manufacturing, who ran a plant in Decatur, Alabama, joined him, and the first product shipped within about two months. The company’s own timeline dates its first order from the Decatur facility to 1983.

For its first four years Lakeland made two things: disposable, limited-use protective garments for industry and specialty work gloves. Demand for such clothing had grown after the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act required certain industries to supply it, the directory notes. In 1986 the company reincorporated in Delaware and, in September, went public on Nasdaq, where it still trades under the symbol LAKE.

The same year it bought two Ohio businesses, Siena Industries and Fyrepel Products, through new subsidiaries called Chemland and Fireland. Fyrepel, already 36 years old, took Lakeland into firefighting garments; Chemland took it into suits for work with hazardous chemicals. The naming habit stuck: Highland for gloves in 1987, and Uniland for woven garments at a new plant in St. Joseph, Missouri.

From Decatur to Weifang, Celaya and beyond.

The early 1990s were difficult. The directory says asbestos-removal contractors moved from Tyvek garments to cheaper polypropylene ones, and a weak economy hurt sales further; Lakeland closed Chemland’s Ohio plant, sold its Chicago hospital-garment business, Walter H. Mayer & Co., and moved Fireland’s production to outside contractors.

Recovery came through expansion abroad. Lakeland formed a Canadian subsidiary in Burlington, Ontario, in December 1994 and a Mexican one in November 1995, and the company’s timeline says plants in Weifang, China, and Celaya, Mexico, came online in 1998, with 36,000 square feet added at Decatur in 1999. The directory adds that after September 2001 its highest-grade chemical suits appeared in Time and on CNN and were worn at the World Trade Center site and during the anthrax clean-up that followed.

The range kept widening. The company’s timeline lists the purchase of the Indian glove maker RFB Latex and the high-visibility garment maker Mifflin Valley in 2005, the same year it introduced its ChemMax line of chemical protective clothing; new facilities in India and Vietnam in 2018, when it introduced CleanMax garments for cleanrooms; and production shifts to protective suits for healthcare workers during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and again in 2020. In 2021 the corporate headquarters moved to Huntsville, Alabama, less than an hour from one of its North American fulfilment centres, the company says.

Lakeland says it manages or owns all of its manufacturing. Its October 2026 investor profile counts about 2,600 employees and nine manufacturing locations in eight countries, with distributors in more than 50 countries; those are the company’s own figures.

Protective equipment and its trade.

Personal protective equipment is sold on sight as much as on specification, and the makers in this guide present themselves in a shared visual language. The strongest signal is colour: fluorescent yellow and orange, the tones of high-visibility vests, jackets and rainwear, appear across catalogues, packaging and trade-show stands, usually set against a dark navy, charcoal or black.

Photography does much of the work. Catalogues and websites show safety glasses, earmuffs and hard hats on workers rather than on a white background alone: a welder behind a visor, a road crew in reflective stripes, a warehouse picker in cut-resistant gloves. Construction sites, factory floors and utility work are the usual settings, and many makers add a second, outdoor register for shooters, hunters and anglers, with camouflage, sunglasses styling and range photography.

Product pages lean on order. Gloves are shown in grids by coating, cuff and size; glasses in rows by lens tint; earplugs and earmuffs by type. Standards and ratings are printed as part of the design, in badges and code numbers, and ranges are often organised by the hazard or the trade they are sold for rather than by style alone.

The trade meets at fairs. A+A in Düsseldorf, the international trade fair for safety and health at work, gathers makers and distributors from around the world, and in the United States the National Safety Council’s Safety Congress & Expo serves a similar role. Many makers also sell through distributor networks and buying groups, so brochures, counter displays and sell sheets carry as much of the identity as the logo itself. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it is based — and attributes claims to the company where they rest on its own word.

An oak leaf redrawn as a shield.

Since 2022 Lakeland has bought its way into fire equipment. Its timeline lists Eagle, a fire and industrial protective-apparel maker in Manchester, England, in 2022; Pacific Helmets of Whanganui, New Zealand, in 2023; Jolly, a footwear maker headquartered in Montebelluna, Italy, with production in Bucharest, in 2024; the German turnout-gear and garment-care group LHD, based in Wesseling, in June 2024; and Veridian, a US maker of firefighter apparel, gloves and boots, in December 2024. In February 2025 the International Fire & Safety Journal reported the company, now presenting itself as Lakeland Fire + Safety, setting out a plan to keep consolidating fire turnout gear and decontamination services. Its legal name remains Lakeland Industries, Inc.

The management changed with the strategy. Jim Jenkins, a director since 2012, had become president, chief executive and executive chairman, the journal reported in February 2025; in April 2026 it reported the promotion of Kevin Rae, managing director of Eagle Technical Products since 2013, to lead the Eagle, Jolly and LHD brands across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The company’s October 2026 investor profile says it has sold its HPFR and HiViz product lines and has been notified of an intended award under the UK’s National Firefighter PPE Framework.

The mark changed too. The company says the original Lakeland brand used a green and white oak leaf, which it has redrawn as a dual-tone “shielded leaf” paired with “a more traditional stamped-type font,” meant to nod to protective clothing as a last line of defence. Its investor material carries the line “Protect Your People.” No colour values or typeface names are published.

For a design guide, Lakeland Industries shows how a company can keep a founding emblem while changing almost everything around it, from a disposable-suit maker to a group of fire brands. Compare MCR Safety, another American protective-equipment maker, and Ansell, whose range also runs from gloves to chemical suits. For this guide we use a leaf green, a dark ink and an ember orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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