A shop built on
one stubborn idea.
When Dan and Maria Reyes opened Northline in the spring of 2005, powder coating in West Michigan was dominated by a handful of large shops that treated anything under a full pallet as a nuisance. The two of them had spent a combined fifteen years working inside operations like that — Dan running pretreatment chemistry, Maria handling scheduling and QC — and they were tired of watching small fabricators get pushed to the back of the line.
Their first facility was a rented 4,000 square foot bay off Chicago Drive with a used batch oven and a hand-me-down blast cabinet. The first job was a set of twelve custom gate frames for a landscaper down the road. The second was a run of motorcycle wheels that a Detroit restoration shop needed in a specific RAL grey that nobody else would mix.
That mix — small runs, weird colors, real deadlines — became the foundation of the business. By 2012 Northline had outgrown the Chicago Drive bay and moved into a 22,000 square foot building on Burton Street. In 2018 we doubled down with a second coating cell and the automated pretreatment line that still handles most of our production work today.
We are still family-owned. Maria runs operations and scheduling. Dan still walks the pretreatment line every morning before the first rack goes in. Their son Eli, who grew up sweeping the shop floor after school, now runs quality control.