“I always wanted to make something with my own hands for somebody else.” The story of our founder, Dan, starts a long way from Vista’s manufacturing facility in Simi Valley, California. As a boy growing up in 1960s Cuba, he was fascinated with how things were made and creating inventions. When his family won political asylum in the United States, he was already on the path to achieving the American dream.

As an electrical contractor in California, Dan realized that he could build a more reliable and better-looking line of low voltage landscape lighting fixtures himself. For the next six years, he was an electrician by day, and an engineer by night, selling fixtures built in his garage to electrical wholesale customers. By 1990, business was good. So good, he quit his day job and moved Vista into its first 600 square foot industrial space.

“Made in the USA means the world to me.” The business that started in a garage now had distribution spreading across the U.S. and around the world. Vista’s dedication to American-made product stood out among competitors. Thanks to its unique manufacturing process and vertical integration of key manufacturing phases, tasks that are typically outsourced are completed in the U.S.

Dan has taken Vista from a boyhood dream to a manufacturing plant that now occupies three large buildings on Surveyor Avenue in Simi Valley, California. As he puts it, “This can only happen in one place on the planet: the USA.”