Flex is celebrating 700 customer milestone with new customer DTC Grip and Lighting

At Flex Rental Solutions, we’re celebrating! On March 28th we reached our 700th customer! We’re honored in the trust our customers have placed in Flex and have joined us on this journey as we grow, expand, and develop Flex into the best rental and inventory management software for our clients.

We are proud to announce that our 700th customer is DTC Grip & Lighting from Emeryville, California. The company was started in 1986 by gaffers, and now, cinematographers Peter Thomas and Steve Condiotti. As they became more in demand, they were able to grow the company beyond their owner-operator status into a full service, high quality, customer-focused state of the art rental facility.

Over the last three decades, DTC has equipped and participated in most of the major iconic feature films and television productions occurring in the Bay Area, including  Oscar winning films  “Milk” starring Sean Penn and “Blue Jasmine” starring Cate Blanchett. In addition, Peter and Steve have been involved in other projects around the world, including high-end commercials, tech industry content, and studio design.

“The company started to grow and kept growing based on the projects we were doing. I was the Chief Lighting Technician on television series, including Nash Bridges based in San Francisco, and subsequently feature films, including the Matrix sequels, and a number of films with Robin Williams,” said co-owner Steve Condiotti.

“Peter was also working on very high end commercial work in Los Angeles and abroad with major commercial directors and cinematographers, so we were expanding rapidly. With the exposure to these kinds of productions— came the expectations for excellence, as well as service, knowledge, and technical expertise.  We’d ended up getting a pretty good reputation with producers and studios that relied on us for equipment that is still evident to this day, and a big part of the company’s DNA”, added Condiotti.

Before starting to use Flex for their rental and inventory management needs, they were using Sage MAS 200 ARP — but the legacy system was not keeping up their needs in recent years as the company and business in general continued to grow and evolve. “It was a system that we’d started using over 15 years ago, and it was one of the only systems that at the time was able to integrate rentals, inventory and accounting, but it was a challenging application to use and it became antiquated for how we were changing,” said Condiotti, “we realized we were kind of the frogs in slowly boiling water, but changing systems seemed like a lot of work and expense. We then came across Flex which offered the opportunity to also work with Quickbooks, and the interface seemed very logical to the way we were assembling our rentals and inventory.  So, it was a perfect and natural fit.”

“Since Peter is currently involved in numerous design and installation projects for major corporate, government, and web studios, we were looking for a program that we’d be able to utilize for those projects as well and Flex seemed very suitable,” added Condiotti.

Welcome aboard DTC Grip and Lighting!