I'm a family-owned American manufacturer. Being made in the US hasn't been easy but it's paying off.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with William Gagnon, executive vice president and COO of Excel Dryer, a hand-dryer manufacturer based in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Their main product is the XLERATOR Hand Dryer. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
We are a family-owned and operated company. I own it with my father, Dennis, who always wanted to own his own manufacturing company and make quality products that were American-made, dependable, and that people like to use. That was his criteria.
The apple didn't fall far from the tree. We've worked together over the years to make sure that it stayed that way.
It's certainly been difficult, with the easy route being to simply source overseas and get things cheap from China and keep costs down and make more margin. But that wasn't who we were.
We always tried to find a better way to do things — to be more efficient, reduce material and labor costs, and have quality employees making a living wage — and still be able to produce an American-made product that was high quality at an affordable price.
We are Made-in-USA certified, which requires a minimum of 84% of materials sourced domestically, but we have far surpassed that. We're really in the upper 90% of being sourced in the US, and almost 50% of our materials are sourced in Massachusetts from very local vendors.
For a while, we couldn't find a motor manufacturer domestically that could compete with motors from China in performance, price, size, and other things. But we have since found a domestic partner and shifted all of our motor manufacturing to be with a partner out of Tennessee.
It has not been easy, and it took a consistent, dedicated effort to always be looking and always be trying to find new vendors as close as possible.
Being made in America differentiates us from other hand dryers and certainly makes a difference to our customers and the buyers.
The recent tariffs have also been good for business. We've been able to control our supply lines and our materials and their costs because they're all domestic. With everyone living in uncertain times and not knowing really where the materials they were buying from people were coming from, we've known, and that has put us in a very competitive position.
One of our top distributors put out an e-blast saying that several of our top competitors were raising their prices, but our name was not on that list. We asked them to put out that same e-blast to say that XL Dryer is American-made and will not be having a price increase because we're tariff resilient and domestically sourced. We have absolutely gotten new customers as a result of this.
We are also a global company. We just put almost 600 hand dryers into the new Istanbul airport. But to get our American-made product into Turkey, there are substantial added costs, such as tariffs and value-added tax. It's a barrier to entry there and makes our product more expensive and less competitive. If those costs can come down through trade negotiations, it's going to open up more international markets for us.
Uncertainty is never good, especially for business, so that the sooner things can be negotiated and put into place, the better it's going to be for all involved.
We're a small manufacturer of a niche product, and everyone's story is different. But for us, in the way we've been doing business and doing it harder than most and making it a part of who we are — and being proud to be American-made in Massachusetts, which is where America was born — it is an exciting time for us.
Being American-made is just who we are. It is in our DNA. But I feel it's as if we almost were looking into the future a little bit to be ready for this moment, and it's maybe a positive for all the hard work over the years that we had to put in to keep it this way. It's nice for it to be paying off.
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