This humble business lights up a lot of lives.

Byline: Bob Welch The Register-Guard

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the seventh in a monthly, 10-part series about what goes on inside various local businesses. Today, L.R.I. in Blachly.

BLACHLY - When orders from around the world come in for L.R.I.'s Photon Micro-Lights, General Manager Cyndee Riggs imagines what the customer is thinking about the multimillion-dollar company.

"That we're some factory next to an airport and our employees are lined up in cubicles," she says.

The truth is that they're sitting in a century-old church-turned-bar-turned-general store-turned-production facility surrounded by forests and farmlands.

That Riggs herself isn't wearing a dress or jet-black pants suit, but jeans shorts, running shoes and a gray Oregon State sweatshirt.

And that if the owners, David and Dallas Allen, show up, they aren't arriving in a limo or his-and-her BMWs, but on their bicycles, having pedaled in from their country home not far away - yeah, the same home where they once put up their French clients who had arrived to do business.

Of the businesses I've written about thus far - heck, of any business I know - none blends success with unconventionality as deliciously as L.R.I., which, naturally, doesn't stand for some technical, lab-nerd name like Luminous Research Investments but Laughing Rabbit Inc.

This is an internationally known business that was named for Bugs Bunny and B'rer Rabbit because they epitomize the company's laugh-and-hurt-nobody philosophy of life.

It begins with David Allen, 58, whose roots go back to 1972 in this bucolic patch of Lane County 20 miles into the Coast Range from Junction City.

A jeweler with an international clientele, one day he and his son, Leo, were fooling around with the idea of putting a tiny light in jewelry using lithium batteries and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Later, while in a bath tub, it dawned on him how he could turn this technology into a micro light that would become light's answer to a firecracker: lots of oomph in a very small package.

He founded the company in 1993 and, nearly 15 years later, its annual sales are in the $3 million to $4 million range. The company's six kinds of lights have become hits with everyone from the military to astronauts to teenagers at raves, thumbs-up testimonials rolling in from around the world: Lost campers who were saved. People in blackouts who found candles. That sort of thing.

Yet he and Dallas, who is technically the owner, have avoided their worst fears: becoming a factory next to an airport where people are working in cubicles.

The Doors are singing "L.A. Woman" on the Internet-streamed radio as I walk into a place I remember, as a teenager, being a grocery store. If The Doors aren't your bag, L.R.I. workers putting together Photon Micro-Lights are free to plug into whatever music they want to hear.

A sweatshop, this ain't.

Potlucks on Friday in the shipping department. No dress code, so jeans rule and flip-flops and Crocs are common.

"Hey, when a distributor calls on the phone they don't know whether the person is in jeans or a three-piece suit, so what difference does it make?" says sales manager Diane Rich.

Dave and Dallas pad around their "corporate office" - a 100-year-old refurbished farmhouse next door - in their socks.

"Some people don't like getting out of bed in the morning, so they might come in and work a 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift," says Riggs, the general manager.

Kid got a soccer game? No problem. "Lots of flexibility here that I didn't have when I worked in a mill," says production manager Dan Santana, who attended Triangle Lake School as a youth.

If baby-sitters can't be found, some of the 30 employees - about half live up here and half in the Eugene-Springfield area - have been known to bring their children to work. On breaks, employees play hacky sack, some managers joining the fun for "hacky breaks."

Downstairs: production, packing and shipping. Upstairs: sales and graphic design. The corporate office comes with a pond and, coincidentally, is where GM Riggs grew up as a kid.

`One new employee came here from Pennsylvania and his first reaction was: `What have I got myself into?' ' says Riggs.

A very cool thing, he soon found out.

There is, you see, method to the laid-back madness: Parts for the lights L.R.I. manufactures arrive from Japan, Malaysia, Corvallis; some of the small plastic casing is dipped - colored - at Bow Tech in Eugene. But this white two-story building with the blue metal roof - think farmhouse - is where the lights are put together, packed and shipped.

About 2,500 are made each day. Some are shipped, via UPS, to 70 sales representatives who distribute in 29 counties and to companies such as REI, Cabela's and L.L. Bean. (L.R.I. does no direct selling.) Most are stored in one of the six railroad cars, sans wheels, on site. A few will be sent by U.S. mail, an easy proposition given that the post office is literally two feet away.

Beyond Triangle Lake School just up the road and a grocery store and cafe down the road, the post office is essentially the only other structure around here that isn't a house or barn.

"It'd be pretty quiet around here without L.R.I.," says postal clerk Pam Hites. "We support them 100 percent, they support us 100 percent."

Indeed, everywhere you turn there's a sense that L.R.I. fits into this community rather than bullies it. L.R.I., for example, helps out the school in myriad ways. And when Eat at Joe's Cafe put in a new tile floor that went awry when customers started walking on it before the glue was dry, Dave and Dallas Allen came to the rescue.

They not only bought new tiles, but laid the floor themselves.

It was the perfect metaphor for the company they run: small lights, from the backwoods of Oregon, lighting up the world.

Bob Welch can be reached at [e-mail].