Gerard Daniel Worldwide, Inc.

History

Our Company was founded in 1952 by Gerard and Ruth Daniel. Originally from Germany, the Daniels immigrated to America in the early 1950s. Mr. Daniel was first exposed to wire cloth while working in Europe. So soon after arriving, he began investigating the pricing of stainless steel wire cloth in the US market. He discovered that US producers were selling their wire cloth at prices far above the cost he could purchase the equivalent screens for in Germany.

After obtaining a small consignment inventory from two German wire weavers, Mr. Daniel began contacting wire cloth users in the US. His basic message was: good qualityand exceptionally competitive prices. He was as good as his word, and soon wire cloth users were beating a path to Gerard Daniel's door.

As the business grew, the Daniels invested their profits in inventory; in time accumulating by far the largest wire cloth inventory in the world. As a result, Mr. Daniel's sales message expanded to include exceptionally broad and deep inventories. Long before the term 'superstore' was coined, the Daniels created the world's first wire cloth superstore - based on huge inventories and low prices.

In the decades that followed, the Daniels expanded their sourcing network to include the very best weavers in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. By the 1980s, Gerard Daniel was easily the largest distributor of industrial wire cloth in North America.

At this point the Daniels, who were in their 70s, decided to sell their company to an investor group that included the company's current CEO. With this change in leadership, the company began to aggressively expand its product, customer, geographic scope, and range of technical capabilities.

Today Gerard Daniel Worldwide makes and sells over 5,000 products to 4,000 active customers worldwide. No customer accounts for as much as 5% of the Company's global sales. Over 90% of these customers are repeat purchasers, with many having been loyal Gerard Daniel customers for decades.

Now, with multiple operations in the US, as well as operations in Canada, Ireland and China, Gerard Daniel Worldwide is a leading manufacturer of wire and wire cloth-based products used in a broad array of OEM applications. These applications range from coffee filters at one end of the technology spectrum to products used for fuel cells and high frequency sound modulation in aircraft at the other.