Steve VanderVeen: How did RepcoLite get its name?

Jacob Rezelman was an experimenter.

He was born in 1907 to a family of painters. In 1938, when he was 31 years old, he worked in the laboratory at Holland Aniline Dye. In the evenings, he mixed paint in the basement of his chicken coop near the corner of Columbia Avenue and 32nd Street.

To do this, he carried heavy bags of raw material down a flight of stairs, where he mixed his recipe. Then he carried the finished paint out of the basement before returning to clean the machines.

By 1945, Rezelman was working for the Donnelly-Kelley Glass Company and had moved to Virginia Park. But his moon-lit paint-mixing business had grown. By 1952, he'd quit his day job, named his side-line business the Rezelman Paint Manufacturing Company, created a brand (Dutch Mill Paints), moved his business to the northeast corner of Homestead Avenue and 17th Street (once a gas station), and found a business partner, Ben Altena.

Before working with Jacob, Ben owned and worked at the Washington Square Barber Shop at 451 Washington Ave. As Ben put it, he joined Jacob because he was “tired of standing in one place all the time.”

From that point on, Jacob and Ben were very busy. They manufactured paint during the day and peddled it door-to-door at night, loading it onto a truck and driving it to the homes of painters, who ordered paint on a day-to-day basis and tinted on-site by mixing in naturally occurring mineral colors.

For example, they painted barns red because iron oxide, or rust, was an inexpensive mineral color to add to paint. Then, with the invention of water-based paints and “synthetic colors,” the color mixing step moved to stores, which made choosing and creating paint colors more convenient for the do-it-yourself consumer market. To serve that market, Jacob and Ben began selling retail, in addition to wholesale.

Jacob and Ben’s partnership lasted until the early 1950s, when health reasons forced Jake and his wife to move to a less humid climate. Ben gradually purchased Jacob’s share and renamed the company Dutch Mill Paints. But Jacob didn't leave the industry. After moving to Arizona, he worked the next 25 years as manager of the New Mexico Paint Company in Albuquerque.

Back in Holland, Ben took on a new partner, Fred VerSchure. While the business survived a fire in 1952, it might not have survived a lawsuit. Unbeknownst to Ben and Fred, a larger, better capitalized business had previously registered a brand Dutch Boy Paints. So, Ben decided to create a new brand name for the paint he manufactured.

He did it by shortening Rezelman Paint Company to “Repco” and attaching to it the word “Lite,” which sounded “cutting edge” and in the popular vernacular at the time. Later, Ben also changed the name of the company to RepcoLite. Ben’s son, Dave, became an officer of the business in the mid-1960s. In 1967, RepcoLite opened a second store on the northside of Holland and, in 1975, a store in Jenison.

Still, over the years, RepcoLite's business focus has remained constant. While it specializes in custom paint manufacturing to serve commercial painters and industry, including architectural painting (e.g. decks and walls) and industrial coatings (e.g. machinery and furniture), it's primarily a retail company, with two-thirds of its employees working in that side of the business.

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When Ben retired in 1976, Fred became president, Dave remained secretary-treasurer, and Don Plasman became vice president. Dave became president in 1980. By 2005, RepcoLite had five wholesale and retail stores.

In 2007, RepcoLite bought Snyder Paints of Goshen, Indiana, and Port City Paints of Muskegon. It also began to carry Benjamin Moore Paints. By 2011, RepcoLite had sevenlocations in Michigan and Indiana.

Since then, stores were added in Kalamazoo, Byron Center and on Fulton Street near downtown Grand Rapids. In2023, RepcoLite bought Teknicolor Paints of Metro Detroit. The company now has 135 employees, 30 of which work in Holland.

Information for this story comes from Robert Swierenga’s "Holland, Michigan," an obituary for Jacob Rezelman, the website for RepcoLite, Holland City Directories, and correspondence with Dan Hansen and Dan Altena of RepcoLite.

— Steve VanderVeen is a resident of Holland. You may reach him at skvveen@gmail.com. His book, "The Holland Area's First Entrepreneurs," is available at Reader’s World.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Holland History: How did RepcoLite get its name?