From Hardware Store to National Distributor

The next company in the ID 2024 "Watch List," Black & Company Industrial and Safety, began more than 100 years ago as a hardware store in Decatur, Illinois.

For more than 60 years, the company provided retail hardware products to central Illinois' agriculture and manufacturing sectors, until it began its evolution into a full-line distributor in the 1980s.

Today, the company operates six facilities in Illinois and Indiana — with a footprint that spans from coast to coast.

For earlier Watch List profiles, read here, here, here and here; for the complete list see the latest edition of Industrial Distribution magazine.

Black & Company

Company name: Black & Company Industrial and Safety
Nominated by: AD
Top executive(s): Tommy Black, president; Steve Galetti, corporate sales manager; Tom McCoy, safety division manager; Val Roberts, branch operations
Year founded: 1920
Headquarters: Champaign, Ill.
Website: blackandco.com
Number of locations: 6
Key product categories: MRO, safety, PPE & workwear, hand & power tools, lifting and rigging, abrasives, cutting tools, engineered adhesives, instrumentation
Total employee headcount: 91
Total SKU count: 325,000

Company commentary: Black & Company was founded in Decatur, Illinois, in 1920 by Roy M. Black. Up until the 1980s, the organization operated as a retail hardware Black & Co.store, serving an already booming agriculture industry along with a rapidly growing manufacturing base in central Illinois. Today, Black & Company has grown from its humble beginnings as a Decatur walk-in hardware store to a full-line industrial distributor with stocking locations in six cities across Illinois and Indiana. While we once possessed a regional footprint primarily working with end-users and clients in our immediate Midwestern geography, we have evolved into a national distributor with end-users throughout the country.

Black & Company serves a diverse range of customers, but is driven by the utility, power generation, automotive, government and defense, plastic injection molding, aerospace, general industry, and grain processing segments.

We provide a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class industrial products, but what is core to our identity is our service-heavy approach to our customer relationships, outside of supplying material or products. A selection of our more sought-after services consists of: integrated supply and inventory management, advanced tool repair programs – including asset tracking and timestamp milestones for customer visibility throughout the process – ladder and fall protection inspection services focused on OSHA compliance, electrical glove management program (NAIL accredited lab), in-house gas instrumentation repair and calibration, respiratory fit testing, a variety of industrial vending models, tool crib management and tool crib reorganization.

Do they offer e-commerce? We offer a B2B punch-out solution for our key commercial customers, and a customer specific e-commerce solution that we curate in partnership with client stakeholders, in which pre-approved items for purchase are visible for e-commerce purchases (similar to punch-out). We established both of these in 2015. While this is a smaller portion of our business, the program has been exceedingly valuable for multi-site clients with SKU standardization goals in mind. We intend to build upon this online B2B platform in 2024, as we prepare to migrate to a new ERP with more robust customer facing features.

Recent company news: Black & Company celebrated its centennial in 2020; it has been family-owned and -operated for the duration of its 104-year history.