RiverStar’s contract manufacturer history begins in 1984, when three visionary engineers founded our sister company, RiverSide Electronics. In the beginning, the partners were conducting contract manufacturing of electromechanical assemblies in a partner’s home. By 1988, having experienced substantial growth, RiverSide employed over 200 employees, and was soon recognized by Business Week magazine as one of the 25 fastest growing high tech companies in the United States.

With the increase in customer base, requests for packaging, kitting and distribution started rolling in. As many manufacturers understand, these tasks don’t easily fit within true manufacturing. In 1995, founder Stephen H. Craney founded RiverStar Inc., with the focus on providing assembly, packaging, kitting, testing, and distribution services for OEM companies as a contract manufacturer.

Our first customer was a large agriculture equipment manufacturing company introducing a new GPS technology into the agricultural market. Today, GPS technology is everywhere, but back then, this system was a very innovative approach utilizing GPS technology along with different sensors and interface equipment.

RiverStar was tasked with procuring the necessary components of the system from multiple suppliers, building these components into a system, and testing its functionality. Upon successful completion of the testing process, components were packaged into necessary kit configurations and distributed across the OEM’s dealer network. These units were ready for installation on farm equipment in the field and distributed throughout the world.

The use of GPS technology today has taken off and is commonplace in the farming community. RiverStar is fortunate to have had the opportunity to support this customer throughout all aspects of this technology growth. Through the years and now on a much greater scale, RiverStar is still supporting that same customer with superior manufacturing, testing, kitting, and distribution services.

In the early 2000s, RiverStar was approached with a new type of opportunity to start a repair operation for a large medical X-ray printer manufacture. Because of the experienced staff and the processes that were built during the previous years, this was a natural fit for RiverStar. Complete troubleshooting, tear down, repair, reassembly, and test of mechanical and electromechanical assemblies became a cornerstone of our contract manufacturer company.