Tripp Lite Brand Guidelines: Chicago Headlights, Power Strips and the Eaton Tripp Lite Series

A headlight maker on Chicago’s South Side.

Tripp Lite dates its history to 1922 and to Chicago, where it has kept its headquarters; English Wikipedia gives that founding year, and in 2022 the trade site DCPost MEA marked the brand’s hundredth year. The business did not begin in computing. DCPost MEA wrote in July 2022 that the brand dates back to when it made headlights for the young automobile industry.

The company’s early form is described in an August 2022 investigation by ProPublica. It names the original businessman as Graham Trippe, whose company made headlights and would go on to produce the rotating warning lights used on police cars, tow trucks and other emergency vehicles. The firm was then called Trippe Manufacturing; the shorter, two-word name Tripp Lite came later.

The same report traces the leadership that followed. Barre Seid, who had joined as an assistant to Trippe, was the company’s president by the mid-1960s, according to ProPublica, and he went on to lead Tripp Lite for more than half a century as its president and sole owner. In the decades that followed, ProPublica wrote, the company came to sell the power strips that supply electricity to computers and the server racks, cooling equipment and network switches used in data centres.

ProPublica describes the company as a supplier that grew with the shift to cloud computing and the spread of large data centres, and English Wikipedia says the same: its products became widely used in data centres. The headquarters stayed on the South Side of Chicago, ProPublica reported.

From power strips to racks and PDUs.

By the 2010s Tripp Lite sold a wide catalogue. English Wikipedia lists its categories as UPS systems and replacement batteries, surge protectors, power strips and power distribution units, cables and connectors, power inverters, KVM switches, racks and rack cooling, power-management software, laptop accessories and audio-visual equipment. It also gives the company more than 450 staff and a sales presence in over 80 countries, citing Crain’s Chicago Business in 2012.

Trade reports at the time of its sale described the same range in narrower terms. When the deal closed in March 2021, T&D World called Tripp Lite a supplier of power-quality products and connectivity solutions, naming single-phase uninterruptible power supplies, rack power distribution units, surge protectors and enclosures for data centre, industrial, medical and communications customers in the Americas. In February 2022 AVI Latinoamérica put the catalogue at more than 5,000 products, sold in around 80 countries.

Eaton explained the purchase in terms of that range. In the announcement quoted by T&D World, Uday Yadav, president and chief operating officer of Eaton’s Electrical Sector, said Tripp Lite’s products would add breadth to Eaton’s edge computing and distributed IT portfolio and expand its single-phase UPS business.

Later trade coverage showed how far the catalogue reached beyond power. DCPost MEA, reporting in 2022 on Eaton’s launch of the range in the Middle East, Europe and Africa, listed server racks, enclosures, cables and connectivity products such as docking stations and KVM switches among the thousands of products now offered through Eaton. Jean-Marc Emonet, a marketing and product-line manager at Eaton for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told the site that the acquisition made Eaton a single source of power products and accessories for IT distributors, and pointed to demand from hybrid home and office working for videoconferencing rooms that need a lot of connectivity.

Power protection and the data centre.

The makers of uninterruptible power supplies, power distribution and precision cooling sell equipment that most people never see. It stands in plant rooms and data halls behind locked doors, so the companies tend to show it in place: long rows of grey cabinets under white light, battery strings racked floor to ceiling, switchgear with its doors open, and chillers and heat-rejection units lined up on rooftops and in yards outside.

The data hall itself has become the stock image of the trade. Photographs and renderings return again and again to cold-aisle containment, with server racks closed in behind glass doors and ceiling panels, to cooling units set between the racks, and to engineers with laptops checking a cabinet’s display. As computing loads have grown, liquid-cooling pipework, coolant units and prefabricated modules built off site have joined the cabinets in the pictures.

Factories, test laboratories and trade fairs supply the rest. These companies often show their own production lines and test bays, where equipment is run before it ships, and the industry gathers at events such as Data Centre World and the DCD conference series, where makers fill stands with UPS cabinets, cooling units and power distribution gear and present new ranges to data-centre operators and engineers. Corporate language leans on continuity: Vertiv, for example, presented itself as “Architects of Continuity” when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.

The companies in this guide range from listed groups to family firms, and several carry long histories under changing owners. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A century-old name kept inside a larger group.

The change of ownership came in two steps. According to ProPublica, which reported in August 2022 on documents it had reviewed with The Lever, a non-profit called the Marble Freedom Trust was created in April 2020, and Barre Seid then transferred his entire stake in Tripp Lite to it. In March 2021 Tripp Lite was bought by Eaton, the power-management group; T&D World reported the completion of the acquisition on 18 March 2021, describing Eaton as having its headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, and an operational headquarters in Beachwood, Ohio. ProPublica also noted that Tripp Lite had a subsidiary in Nova Scotia, Canada, whose filings changed in the same month.

Tripp Lite did not disappear as a name. In February 2022 AVI Latinoamérica reported that the company had changed its logo to read “Tripp Lite by Eaton” to reflect the integration, and quoted the company as saying the combination let it offer “the best of both companies,” including expert advice before and after a sale. In July 2022 DCPost MEA wrote that the products were initially marketed under that name and that the Tripp Lite name would be kept when the ranges were fully rebranded as the Eaton – Tripp Lite Series. The brand therefore now trades as a product series of Eaton rather than as an independent company.

For a design guide, Tripp Lite shows how a long-running catalogue name can be folded into a parent group in stages: first a “by Eaton” endorsement on the logo, then a series name under the parent’s mark. Compare Eaton, its owner since 2021, and CyberPower, another maker of desktop and rack UPS units. For this guide we use a slate blue, a cool grey and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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