Half a century ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a small group of smart, creative, entrepreneurial managers and engineers from Lear Siegler had a vision: to build their own company founded on two core principles: innovation and teamwork.   After a couple of interesting, but short-lived product ideas (including a can opener designed to cut through the tear bands typically found on cans of meat and coffee in the fifties), one of the team members and his wife, Ted and Duane Thompson came up with what can literally be called a bright idea: x-ray marking tape, offering a new and revolutionary way to accurately mark x-rays, replacing the cumbersome and awkward traditional lead letters.    The new product was called X-Rite.

　　Things moved on fast from there.  The ‘manufacturing facility’, which essentially consisted of an old dining table and chairs and a buffet with drawers to store materials, moved out of Ted and Duane’s basement into an old unheated building in a rundown part of Grand Rapids.  Following growing successes with the sale of the X-Rite marking tape to hospitals around the United States, what had now become known as the X-Rite Company moved to a real cement building, and the founders finally started drawing a salary.  In the meantime, product development was booming at X-Rite and the company developed a highly successful electrolytic silver recovery machine used to recuperate silver from the photographic x-ray filter solution.

　　The nineteen seventies refined and redefined the company in many ways.  Simple densitometry used in the x-ray processing market emerged as a major market opportunity for X-Rite and the company made the strategic decision to become an instrument company.  The X-Rite product line began with densitometers and sensitometers used to measure optical or photographic density and to expose photographic films to a standard reference.  During that time, a host of new products were developed, patents were granted, and key customers included Eastman Kodak, and Fuji Films; by 1979, sales revenue reached $2.5 million.  After attending its first DRUPA in 1982, X-Rite signed on many European dealers and grew from being a small Michigan based company, to a truly international organization.  By the mid eighties, business was growing fast and the company needed a new facility, manufacturing lab and equipment.  In order to raise capital to sustain its growth, the Board of Directors decided to take the company public.  On April 10th 1986, with sales just under $10 million, the company became X-Rite, Incorporated (NASDAQ: XRIT). 

　　　Having successfully launched its densitometer product line, the Company was now determined to measure color wherever it was found, opening up unlimited opportunities and in the first quarter of 1989, the spectrophotometer was introduced.  This instrument was the result of 2 years of research and development efforts.  It was less expensive, more compact, and more versatile than competitors’ instruments.  It would lead the Company to a whole new family of products.  X-Rite’s first colorimeter was also introduced in 1989.  It was the next logical stage in the evolution of the Company, measuring and matching colors in a wide variety of materials from paint to fabrics to plastics.  X-Rite had finally transitioned from a simple instrument company to a world-class provider of value-driven instruments, software and solutions to inspire, measure, communicate, render and simulate color. 

　　In spite of an often unsettled global economic climate, the nineteen nineties brought good fortune to X-Rite.  Thanks to a flurry of groundbreaking new product developments -- including portable and affordable colorimeters and spectrophotometers -- solid and steady international growth -- with the opening of offices around the globe, and a round of acquisitions with the purchase of a dealership in the U.K -- the company reached a significant milestone at the end of the century with net sales of $100.2 million.

　　After a rocky start to the new millennium, largely due to the difficult economic conditions of the times, X-Rite soon returned to a welcome growth with a number of high profile products hitting the market, including a new auto scanning densitometer designed for the newspaper industry, new retail color matching systems and a high performance bench top spectrophotometer.  In July 2006, X-Rite completed the purchase of Amazys Holdings AG, owners of the world renowned GretagMacbeth and Munsell products.  Just over a year later, X-Rite also acquired Pantone Inc., the worldwide market leader in color communication and specification standards in the creative design industries. The merging of the strongest talent pools in the industry is already driving innovation, standards development and further diversifying the Company’s business, leading the new 21st century X-Rite to become the undisputed market leader in the color industry. 

　　Today, X-Rite employs more than 1000 people in over 100 different countries.  Over the years the company has filed over 200 patents and its products are used by leading blue chip companies including Agfa, Apple, Heidelberg, HP, Kodak, Komori, PPG, Sony, Wal-Mart, Xerox, just to name a few.  As we look back over this company’s colorful fifty year history, in spite of slow starts and fast growth, glory days, and difficult times, through acquisitions and mergers, across continents, cultures and languages, X-Rite’s founding principles of innovation and teamwork remain stronger and truer than ever. Through best-of-breed tools and applications, X-Rite’s relentless mission is to enable its customers to experience color consistency across the entire digital supply chain - across globally diverse processes, locations, and devices - providing them unmatched ability to achieve unparalleled results and truly own their color.

[时间：2008-03-13  作者：佚名  来源：X-Rite]