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PuriFan grows with popularity of its smoke-eating
fans
Three years after
opening, Wichita-based PuriFan Inc. -- a company
formed when Derby resident Paul Fiacco invented
and patented an air-cleaning ceiling fan --
has plans to triple its space and work force.
PuriFan has three locations: a shipping and
receiving facility near Pawnee and Hydraulic,
a corporate office at Broadway and Douglas,
and a paint shop in Andover.
With sales growing at 96 percent in the past
two years, PuriFan is quickly running out of
space for the thousands of fans it ships yearly.
PuriFan inventor Paul Fiacco, who is also vice
president of product development, says the company
is looking for a location that will allow it
to consolidate all three offices and make room
for future growth.
Nothing has been finalized yet, but PuriFan
will most likely relocate to a space near Pawnee
and Hydraulic, where Fiacco says there are rows
of warehouses with office space included. He
says the company needs at least 20,000 square
feet. President Mael Hernandez says he hopes
to have a location selected and to start moving
by January.
PuriFan, which has remained lean with only five
employees, also will double or triple its staff
in the next 12 months.
Consolidating locations
The company has sold about 5,000 fans this year
through 42 distributors in 36 states. The fans
are in nearly 300 businesses in Wichita. With
patents pending on several new filters and a
new national marketing campaign ready to start
selling to the residential market, PuriFan is
expecting its growth to continue.
"We're running out of space," Hernandez
says. "As sales keep growing, we need to
inventory more and more products. If we actually
put a little marketing behind it, what the possibilities
could be are amazing."
PuriFan will soon sign on with a national advertising
agency to start marketing the fans to households
across the country. The products have so far
been purchased mostly for commercial use, especially
in restaurants and bars as a way to reduce smoke.
The fans work with two types of filters. One
works to reduce dust, odor, mold spores and
pollen, and the other helps clean the air of
smoke from tobacco products. PuriFan is also
developing a filter to get rid of germs in doctors'
offices and a filter for use in industrial settings.
A change in its distribution strategy helped
grow the company. It used to take any distributor
who came along and had no restrictions on where
they could sell, Hernandez says. Distributors
ended up competing against each other. The process
has changed, and now distributors are given
specific territories to sell in.
PuriFan's products are manufactured by Odessa,
Mo.-based Heartland Technologies. Once they
are made, the fans are sent to Wichita where
they're assembled by Goodwill Industries and
shipped out of PuriFan's office at 1828 Northern.
The units, which are 29 inches in diameter,
attach to the motor of a regular ceiling fan
and replace the blades. While the fan rotates,
it sucks up air, filters it and re-circulates
it.
A study conducted by Wichita State University
determined that the fans move 2,000 to 3,000
cubic feet of air a minute.
Big Sky Bar and Grill in Old Town uses three
fans from PuriFan. Co-owner Alec Walterscheid
says that even though the fans don't take all
the smoke out of the air, there is a marked
difference.
"If we're at capacity and everyone's smoking,
it's not going to completely clear it out, but
it still does help," Walterscheid says.
"I've stood under one when people are smoking,
and you can just see (the smoke) go up."
Fiacco says he's surprised by how well PuriFan
has done.
"I didn't know what it was going to turn
into, I just knew it worked," he says.
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