For Radford-based air purifier company Oransi, the buzzword is “reshoring.”
Its founder, Peter Mann, and his partners — chief technology officer (and father) Moe Barani and chief operating officer (and son) Ben Barani — use it a lot. It means making products at home, not overseas.
It took the Oransi team a lot of work on a proprietary process to pull it off. Moe Barani, an electric motor engineer, designed a machine that doesn’t require the labor and hours expended in China, South Korea and other countries that assemble most of the air purifiers on the market, they say.
As a bonus, the motor is adaptable for multiple uses. Oransi, which has a 156,000-square-foot building in Radford, plans to use it to grow beyond consumer-market air purifiers and into an electric motor company that develops products including thermal cooling solutions and drones, Mann says.
Not that Oransi is now disinterested in clean air. Mann and the Baranis are putting the motor into a new generation of purifiers soon, replacing their two largest devices, which had been made in China. And they say they’re on a mission to educate customers about clean air’s importance and how their products, which top out at about $250 apiece, can help.
“If you ask me what is the most important thing in humanity: It’s clean air. Without clean air, we cannot survive,” Moe Barani said.
Coming together
Mann, a Syracuse, New York, native, said he worked in web functionality, marketing, operations and more for computer company Dell in Austin, Texas, before starting Oransi in 2009. He said that watching his son deal with childhood asthma inspired him to get into the air purifying business.
“So I wanted to develop products to help him and people like him breathe cleaner air, especially for asthma or any other type of respiratory issue,” said Mann, who had moved back East by 2018.
He didn’t have an engineering department, so he contracted with manufacturers in China, and later in Connecticut, he said.
He first met Moe Barani about a decade ago, when Barani co-owned Aspen Motion Technologies (later bought by Moog Inc.).
The Iranian native grew up in Woodstock and graduated from Virginia Military Institute in 1984. The next year, Barani began work in the electric motor industry and moved to Radford in 1989 to work for companies including Kollmorgen and the company that bought it, Regal Rexnord.
Mann and Barani discussed doing a project together and decided to keep in touch.
In recent years, Moe and Ben Barani — the latter also a VMI-educated engineer who graduated in 2016 — were running their own company, Aviemore Technologies. Oransi and Aviemore merged in 2021 and set about their reshoring project. By then, Moe Barani had an idea for a motor technology that would work with Mann’s air purifiers.
“So what we did was, we focused on how to improve the manufacturing process, the design and manufacturing process, and that’s for proprietary technologies, to utilize this type of electric model that has been around for 60 years, 50 years … without any [manufacturing] automation requirement,” Moe Barani said.
About 700 iterations later, they had something.
“The fantastic, amazing thing about it is that it can be utilized almost in any application that requires electric motors,” he said.
Lean and green
Oransi’s products are smaller and lighter than their competitors, and more energy efficient, the owners said.
“There really hasn’t been, from our perspective, [in] comparison to chips and batteries, a heavy investment in maximizing efficiency and innovating the electric motor technologies,” Ben Barani said. “That is one way to get to renewables quicker: If you make your motors more efficient, you can reduce your demand on the power grid.”
Mann and the Baranis said that their breakthrough came in reducing the number of people needed to build their products while keeping costs low. It has allowed them to sell a product with a competitive price to North Americans. The self-funded company has $15 million in annual sales, Ben Barani said.
Oransi has 25 full-time and six part-time employees, with plans to add more as manufacturing increases with demand.
“North American consumers are very sophisticated,” Moe Barani said. “They want the best of all the features and performance and quality at the lowest price. And it’s a tough task to make that happen. And so you have to do that in your innovation. You have to be fast to market. You have to change fast. And if you don’t do that, you’re going to go out of business.”
Beyond COVID
Air purifying machines have always been a niche market, but demand shot upward after the COVID-19 pandemic, they said. That meant that lots of different appliance sellers put their name on air purifiers. They created more competition, but soon began consolidating into a smaller number of companies, Mann said.
Up next are new Department of Energy regulations regarding energy, cost and performance, Moe Barani said. Those will weed out multiple sellers.
“So these new government regulations that are to help the consumers … are going to get some of the folks who are just playing with the numbers and playing games, either to fix their process or get out of the business,” he said. “In this regard, we can consider government regulations a good thing.”
With Oransi’s innovations and regional connections in the electric motor world, Radford and the larger New River Valley should be poised for bigger recognition, they say. Motion control motor tech, the ancestor of what Oransi is doing, has been in Radford since the late 1950s, when Inland Motor expanded from Pearl River, New York, and later merged with Kollmorgen, which had also started in New York.
Multiple Radford-area companies — including Inmotion Zapi, Trova, Volvo, BAE Systems and Nippon Pulse — work with electric motors. The area has a good base of people with manufacturing skills and engineering degrees, they said.
“We kind of consider this the Silicon Valley of electric motors,” Ben Barani said. “From a selling point for the area, as well as economic development, being a Silicon Valley of electric motors could be pretty significant.”