Graco knows how to stand up to tough conditions. In fact, the company, which designs and manufactures thousands of fluid handling products and solutions, was founded on this ability nearly a century ago.
“We were able to handle the harshest materials in the harshest environments,” says Vice President of Sales and Product Management, Graco Industrial Division, Peter Linder. “It was because Minneapolis was 20 below zero, and somebody needed to grease a car within the first era of technology in the automobile.”
In business since 1926, The company’s expertise has only increased over the decades as the team deals with the most difficult materials and fluid handling challenges. “Fast forward to today,” Linder says. “We’re able to handle the most abrasive TIMs used for EV battery assemblies throughout the world.”
TIMs, thermal interface materials, are highly abrasive and hard to pump and are just one of the harsh materials the company can manage. And handling difficult material is natural for a company that cut its teeth on overcoming challenges. “We’ve established the position as a leader in our space through technology,” says Linder, “and we followed the evolution of the various processes that Graco supports (finishing and dispensing); we strive to make every process better for customers around the world.”
Graco has grown steadily over the past 98 years, adding regional headquarters in Belgium, China, and South America while maintaining its global headquarters in Minneapolis, and the business has maintained a leading position in the global marketplace over the century for several key reasons. First is the company’s commitment to maintaining close relationships with customers and solving their problems. “If you stay super close to your customers, you’ll see the problems that they’re facing,” Linder says, “and then you can solve the problem and provide a return on investment.”
Second is the team’s commitment to quality. “We’ve always maintained a really, really high expectation of quality,” he says. “If you were to walk through a Graco factory, they will all have a similar look, feel, and even smell because you’re using the same cutting fluid, and in each of those factories, you see each person responsible for quality. In some operations, you’ll see a quality control (QC) department; that means the parts have to move their way around a facility to get to the QC department. Whereas at Graco, we have a QC bench at every single station. So, if you’re an operator running a machine, you’re also in charge of quality, and if it doesn’t pass quality, there’s one person that’s responsible. [Graco] has high accountability per person, and it’s done the right way every time.”
The third factor is the company’s pursuit of leading-edge technology. New, market-leading products have always driven the company forward and attracted customers. “Compared to our peer group, we put a lot more energy into engineering,” Linder says. “If you just look at dollar-for-dollar spend, we’re probably [spending] twice as much as our peer companies would spend on engineering.”
The company is careful to balance that expenditure with its return on investment (ROI). “When you’re putting that kind of money into engineering, you really need to make sure you’re getting an ROI out of your engineering teams,” he says. “We look at all problems to be solved through ROI, because Graco is very fact-based, and we’re very ROI-driven as well.”
Indeed, it is paramount to find the most efficient, cost-effective solution to benefit all parties involved because, if the solution is “really expensive for the customer, then it has not actually solved a problem,” Linder points out.
Graco’s dedicated engineers tend to stay with the company for the long term, bringing both expertise and extensive experience. “It’s amazing and pretty unique, I would say, to see engineers who have been here for 20-plus years,” Graco Industrial Marketing Director Arria Cocei-Stacy says. “We have this longstanding body of knowledge. Every time we design a new solution, we take it to the next level and challenge ourselves to raise our own bar of performance. To me, that is part of the success. It is not like we are just bringing somebody new and putting them in front of something; it is really that body of expertise and know-how that was built and maintained over decades. I think that really has a lot to do with why we are able to achieve and sustain our market-leading position.”
The longevity of Graco’s products is another unique attribute. “We don’t expect the product to last [only] five years; we really plan for it to last 50 years,” Linder says. “There have been more than a few products that come through our tech assistance or tech services line where people read you the serial number, and you have to go, ‘That thing’s 35 years old.’” Then, remarkably, the customer will reply, ‘Yeah, I just need an O-ring for it,’ or some other minor replacement part in order to maintain the still-working product,” he shares.
“The quality, the longevity—it’s our whole culture,” he says, adding that the company “thinks about this in the long game: ‘I’m going to put this in an automotive plant. I want it to last 25 years under the harshest environment possible.’”
Of late, Graco has been expanding its product range to best serve its customers. “We’re starting to look at [the whole] process,” Linder says. The company already covers a portion of many processes, but wants to cover the entire process for a smoother, more efficient customer outcome. When a single company is responsible for most or all of a customer’s process, “It’s a more durable process and a better ROI for them.”
Handling the complete process makes Graco “highly accountable,” and customers can rest easy knowing they are in good hands from start to finish. Acquisition has been—and is expected to continue to be—an effective means of expanding this coverage. “We can become a complete solution or, at least, a more complete solution, through acquisition,” Linder says.
Already a leader in safety and quality, Graco is always seeking to improve its offerings. When developing a new product for the end user, Linder says that the team likes to ask the question, “How can I make their life better?”
Cocei-Stacy adds that, “Graco is raising the bar from quality and safety to workers’ well-being.”
Take one of the company’s newest products, for example. The new Stellair™ Air Spray Gun portfolio was carefully designed with ergonomics in mind to make it as user-friendly as possible. “We hired a U.S. ergonomics firm, and they’ve done all the work and the testing,” she says. This means that the product design is backed by science. “We have a lot of data on our products and comparable industry alternatives. We are happy to see that Stellair ACE uses up to 25 percent less muscle effort than comparable industrial air spray guns. We believe that when painters produce stellar results, everyone wins, and we hope to see other spray gun manufacturers take on this ergonomics approach in the future.”
A manual spray gun for industrial painting, the Stellair ACE boasts unique, carbon-reinforced construction, which allows it to weigh just 209 grams. This makes it up to 50 percent lighter than virtually any other manual, pressure-feed sprayer on the market. The benefits include a much more comfortable experience for the end user. Watch it here: Expert-Approved Ergonomics: Stellair and Stellair ACE Air Spray Guns.
After nearly a century in business, Graco’s longevity demonstrates the superior quality of the company’s products and its commitment to customers. When looking ahead, management plans to continue on this path of success in order to keep winning over customers. “The goal really is to make it so efficient to do business with us and to create a process that someone’s trying to solve, that they step back and go, ‘I never want to work with anyone but Graco because that was such a great experience,’” Linder summarizes.
