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.
