TrafFix Devices puts safety first

FAIRFIELD – TrafFix Devices was founded nearly 40 years ago by Jack and Sue Kulp.

According to the business’s website, when the couple founded the company in 1986 out of their home, there were only a few traffic safety products on the market. Over time, the business expanded its product line while growing in size, not just in Fairfield but at branches in other cities such as its headquarters in San Clemente, California, plus manufacturing plants in Adelanto, California, and Tijuana, Mexico.

TrafFix Devices Marketing Manager Tom McKeown said the early years of the company were spent developing roadside safety products such as delineation drums, which are used to help mark out a path before a work zone when construction workers have to close a lane.

TrafFix Devices produces barricades and traffic cones, and lately it’s expanded into producing energy absorption and attenuation products. McKeown said one of the company’s products motorists might have seen on the road is its Scorpion truck-mounted attenuator. He said it goes on the back of a vehicle that sits behind the road workers, facing oncoming traffic. If for some reason a motorist does not notice the road crew and crashes into the vehicle, the Scorpion absorbs the energy to protect both the workers and the driver.

TrafFix Devices’ Fairfield location went through a couple of major expansions from 2017-2019. The business grew by 80,000 square feet during an expansion in late 2017-early 2018. The concrete barely had time to settle on that project when the business embarked on another, this time a 17,000-square-foot addition to its roto mold facility in 2019. At the conclusion of the second expansion in December 2019, Jack Kulp flew from his home in California for a dedication ceremony in Fairfield where the company doubled the number of its roto mold machines from two to four.

According to a Union article from 2019, TrafFix Devices began by renting 6,000 square feet of the original Fairfield Economic Development Association Industrial Shell Building in the West Industrial Park. H & H Mold & Tooling rented a segment of the building, as did Fairfield Industries, then known as Fairfield Agricultural Products. Later, TrafFix bought the entire building and rented space to H & H Mold, before that business moved into its own building across the street. All three businesses that began in that shell building have grown and remained an integral part of Fairfield’s economy.

In 2023, the Fairfield Area Chamber of Commerce honored Kulp by presenting him with the Legacy Award at the chamber’s annual awards banquet. Kulp passed the reins of running the business onto his son Jack, who is the company CEO.

McKeown said TrafFix Devices is both an engineering and manufacturing firm, but first and foremost it is a safety company.

“We’re in the business of designing products that have safety at the forefront,” he said. “That’s what permeates the business. We try to design the best products we can.”

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