Customers gathered in the Fanimation showroom to celebrate the company’s third decade in business.
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| Only Tom Frampton (right) founder of Fanimation would think of decorating the company’s 30th anniversary with a replica of an outhouse (complete with ceiling fan). The unusual cake topper commemorates the very real port-a-john he put outside his house to keep his garage fan business separate from family life when he was starting out. |
What started out as a part-time job after school each day turned into a lifelong passion for Tom Frampton, who grew up in California and worked with Casablanca founder and fan visionary Burt Burton for years. Frampton’s fascination with antique fans and tinkering became almost an overnight success with the soaring popularity of his Punkah® reproduction of a vintage pulley ceiling fan system he admired in a restaurant in New Orleans. Soon he branched off into his own company, which he named Fanimation, and relocated to central Indiana. The headquarters also houses an antique fan museum – featuring the most extensive collection of antique ceiling fans in the country with models donated by members of the national Antique Fan Collectors Association. The museum is a popular tourist attraction that brings in guests from other states.
Today Fanimation sells its wide variety of ceiling fans to 1,500+ retail stores and ships its products to approximately 25 countries. While Frampton is still active in fan design for Fanimation, his son Nathan (whose forte is accounting and business development) serves as president and handles the day-to-day operations including keeping abreast of upcoming government regulations in energy efficiency that will be affecting the ceiling fan industry.
