ISIS Power, a suburban Chicago manufacturer of automotive electrical wiring systems, isn't a terrorist organization. That's what president and founder Jay Harris has been telling customers and the curious alike for months.
But sharing a name with a militant Islamic group has proved bad for business recently, and the five-year-old company rebranded itself last week as Infinitybox.
"When things started to go south in the Middle East, for a while we really held our ground," Harris said. "But unfortunately, it just got to a point where the connotation with our brand and some pretty awful people just became so negative."
ISIS Power began as a division of Chicago-based Littelfuse, where Harris worked for 17 years, becoming global director of business development for the automotive division. Harris assembled investors and bought the brand, launching his own company in 2009.
The company has eight employees and does several million dollars in annual revenue, designing and manufacturing electronic control systems for race cars, police and fire command vehicles, buses, military trucks and other vehicles. Basically, anything that can be switched on or off — from sirens to lights to fuel pumps — runs through an ISIS box, according to Harris.
Its original name was an acronym for the product: Intelligent Silicon Integrated System.
"It was a fairly benign brand then, and it started to gain some good traction, some good recognition," said Harris, 41.
But when the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, gained notoriety this year through military advances and gruesome beheading videos, the company began to suffer by association.
Web analytics in recent months revealed that many visitors to the ISIS Power site were looking for the other ISIS, with keywords such as beheading videos topping the list of search terms, according to Harris.
The tipping point for Harris came in September, when a longtime customer opted out of monthly e-mails from the company, for reasons other than inbox clutter.
"His response to me was take me off your list, you are a radical Muslim terrorist," Harris said. "I want nothing to do with your business, I don't want the CIA monitoring my e-mails."
ISIS Power is not the only brand to relinquish its name in the wake of the negative association with the militant organization. Last month, Belgian chocolate maker ISIS changed its name to Libeert after some customers refused to stock the old brand.
Harris said he has spent about $400,000 over the years building up the ISIS Power brand through sponsored cable TV shows, prints ads and other vehicles. He spent another $30,000 over the past few months scrubbing out every trace of it.
