Before launching the company, Massa ran a stage lighting business and later founded a biofuels company in Washington, DC, where he worked on converting commercial fleets to run on cooking oil. When he relocated to North Carolina, he began connecting the dots between his past experiences and started HiViz.

HiViz designs and manufactures lighting and safety systems for fire trucks, ambulances, and other emergency vehicles through its brands FireTech, Redline, and Whirl-E-Bird. The company originally operated out of a barn behind Massa’s home near Lillington, NC. But as the business grew, limitations in broadband connectivity and workforce recruitment pushed the company to look elsewhere.

“We kept vacationing in Western North Carolina, and my wife was like, ‘Well, let’s make a list of all the reasons why we can’t move to Asheville,’” Massa said. “Nothing ended up on the list.”

The move proved transformational.

“It turned out to be a fantastic place to put a business that has to do media, creative, development, engineering, and manufacturing,” Massa said. “There’s a great labor force here, too.”

Massa describes HiViz less as a traditional lighting manufacturer and more as a technology company that happens to build emergency vehicle systems.

“We have more engineers than we have manufacturing employees,” Massa said.

The company has built its business strategy around serving three distinct groups within the emergency vehicle industry: firefighters, fire truck dealers, and apparatus manufacturers. Each group, Massa said, has different priorities, and the company’s products are designed to address all three simultaneously.

Massa is particularly attuned to the needs of first responders and firefighters, as he took on these roles shortly after launching the company. He served in Harnett County first, and now locally with Haywood County EMS and Mills River Fire Department, giving him firsthand experience with the challenges first responders face on the road and at emergency scenes. 

“The fire departments want tech to help them go home after a call,” said Massa. “They don’t want to get run over.”

Massa notes that we are living in a time with more distracted drivers than ever, putting emergency responders at greater risk and requiring more than just bright lights to capture people’s attention. His background in stage lighting shapes the company’s approach to emergency vehicle safety, using color, flash rates, and intensity patterns to guide driver behavior around emergency scenes.

“In stage lighting, the whole purpose is to elicit an emotional response from the audience,” Massa said. “You use lighting to create an environment. Brighter is not always better.”

In addition to carefully configured lighting, HiViz’s technology incorporates digital communication to directly connect with people in the area of an emergency. 

“We tell a story with lights,” Massa said. “That’s visual communication. We tell a story with sound—sirens—that's audio communication. Then the last step is digital communication, and we're sending digital alerts [to smart car dashboards and phones] from our lighting ecosystem on an emergency vehicle.” 

At the dealer level, Massa said the goal is simplicity—they don’t want to spend a lot of time picking out various features for the trucks they sell.

“We make our systems really easy to use,” Massa said. 

The third piece of the company’s strategy focuses on fire truck manufacturers, many of whom are dealing with years-long production backlogs and supply chain challenges. According to Massa, the wait time for a new fire truck has ballooned from roughly six months to as long as five years due to pandemic-era demand spikes and supply chain disruptions.

“For truck manufacturers, we’re focusing on throughput,” Massa said. “There’s this underlying need to improve the speed at which a fire apparatus manufacturer can build a fire truck.”

Massa explained that a single fire truck can require thousands of different lighting configurations, creating manufacturing slowdowns and inventory complications. To simplify this, HiViz is developing systems that are defined by user-configured software variables instead of fixed hardware configurations, allowing the company to produce a smaller number of standardized products at higher volumes while still meeting customer needs.

“If we only focused on the firefighter request for technology and features, then we would continue to balloon the manufacturing process of fire trucks,” Massa said. “But if we’re focusing on all three—firefighter, fire apparatus manufacturer, and the dealer in the middle—we can help them manufacture trucks faster.”

Reshoring production is another way that HiViz is streamlining this supply chain. While much of the company’s manufacturing has historically taken place in South Korea, the company is expanding its footprint in Fletcher with a new facility on Continuum Drive. The move is expected to create dozens of jobs across warehousing, assembly, procurement, engineering, and sales.

Today, HiViz employs fewer than 50 people locally but expects to grow to around 100 employees over the next several years. Western North Carolina continues to offer one of the company’s greatest competitive advantages: quality of life.

“People genuinely want to be in Western North Carolina,” Massa said. “We provide both the job and a reason to be here.”

Learn more at hivizleds.com.