The water-filter vacuum built in Cadillac

If you have ever sat through a Rainbow vacuum demonstration in someone’s living room, you have watched a salesperson pour out a basin of gray, dirty water to prove how much your carpet was hiding. That machine — the one that filters dust through water instead of trapping it in a bag — has been built in Cadillac for more than half a century.

The company is Rexair, and the design goes back further than the town’s involvement. The idea of running dust through water dates to the 1930s; the product got its sunny name, the Rainbow, in 1955. Rexair opened a 100,000-square-foot plant in Cadillac in 1969, and the Rainbow has been coming off the line in northern Michigan ever since. It is a genuinely unusual thing to make here: not a car part or a piece of furniture, but a premium home appliance sold almost entirely in person.

That sales method is half the story. Rainbows are not stacked on a store shelf next to the cheap uprights. They move through independent distributors who book in-home appointments and run the demonstration in front of you, water basin and all — a throwback to the door-to-door era that has somehow survived into the age of two-day online shipping.

The Cadillac plant has stayed busy enough to keep growing. In 2022 the company put money into expanding the facility and even pulled a production line back from Asia to run it in Wexford County instead — the kind of reshoring that does not make national news but means steady shifts for the people who build the things.

So the next time a Rainbow demo ends with that dramatic splash of muddy water on the kitchen counter, you can mention where the machine was actually born: not in some far-off factory, but a few miles off the highway in Cadillac, where they have been quietly building it the whole time.