Darn Good Distributors

Everybody has teeth, so everybody needs a dentist. That's how Justin Woycke explains the wiping rag business: there's always going to be oil, grease, water, and spills, so the product is never going away. Kyler Nixon opens by making the case that niche distributors focused on a single product category are the ones winning in 2026 and beyond, and Justin's company is the proof of concept.

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Wipers are 80% of Wipeco's business and have been for over 60 years. Justin walks through what that focus buys them on the phone, why the company runs a textile recycling collection operation that moves in the opposite direction from rag sales, and how his grandfather's failing cloth diaper service turned into a wiping products company in 1960.

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The back half gets into e-commerce. Justin explains why a heavy, low-cost product makes shipping the central problem, and why he's a "no price guy" while every site pulling more traffic than his has pricing posted.

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👤 Guest Bio

Justin Woycke is Vice President at Wipeco, a wiping products distributor outside Chicago, and the third generation of his family in the business. His grandfather founded it in 1960 as a cloth diaper service and moved into wiping rags when disposable diapers arrived. Justin also leads Chicago Textile Recycling, the company's collection division, and serves on the board of SMART, the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why wipers stay at 80% of the business, and what happens with the jansan add-ons they don't refuse but never advertise
• The Queen Bee Role: how picking, packing, shipping, and customer service each protect one outcome
• The 1960 origin story, from cloth diapers to recycled T-shirt rags
• Why textile recycling volume goes up when rag sales go down, and Justin's honesty about not being able to explain it
• The environmental argument against rental shop towels, and why Justin puts "green" in quotes for both sides
• Cutting moved overseas 20 or 30 years ago as labor got expensive, with material coming back in 43,000 pound container loads
• The educational series on their site and what it's meant to do
• Posted pricing versus quote forms when the same box costs 20 dollars to ship to Milwaukee and 50 to Seattle

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Wipeco
• Chicago Textile Recycling
• Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz, the source of the Queen Bee Role concept Justin credits but couldn't name on the recording
• ChatGPT and Claude, referenced on AI-driven traffic to niche content
• Google Analytics
• Kyler Nixon on LinkedIn

Organic traffic is falling thirty to forty percent across multiple industries, but the raw number of leads looks about the same. That combination is strange enough to stall a marketing team for a quarter. Mark Roskowske has now watched it happen from inside three different businesses, and his read is that the funnel didn't shrink so much as it shifted downward.

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Kyler Nixon and Mark work through what happens when the channel you built the company on starts to wobble. Mark spent about 15 years in e-commerce where paid search fed the pipeline and scoring systems handed prospects to sales. It worked until cost per acquisition went through the roof.

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They get into why years of bottom-of-funnel spend covered up a messaging problem, what it costs to rebuild mid and upper funnel work you skipped, and why trade shows are the number one budget item at Mark's company this year by ten X. Plus the first mention of ABM in 50-plus episodes of the show.

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👤 Guest Bio

Mark Roskowske is VP of Marketing and Technology at PierTech Systems, a Chesterfield, Missouri manufacturer of patented helical pile and deep foundation systems sold to general contractors and specified by engineers. He spent roughly 15 years in B2B e-commerce marketing across the ShowMeCables and Infinite Electronics family of connectivity brands before moving to the manufacturing side. He consulted with PierTech for ten years and directed its marketing before taking the role full time, the first full-time marketing hire the business has had.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why thirty to forty percent organic traffic declines aren't showing up in raw lead counts yet, and what that says about where the funnel actually moved
• How plenty of budget, plenty of runway, and not enough competition let a team harvest buy-ready demand for years without building anything above it
• What happens to your campaign ROI when you subtract branded search from the reporting
• The USP work Mark did at his last two companies, and finding messages the company believed that customers had never heard
• Why trade shows are the number one budget line by ten X when a project takes three years from booth conversation to active bid
• Selling to general contractors, chasing spec position with engineers, and Kyler's former boss's term for it: belly to belly
• The account-based marketing push aimed at a dozen named companies, opportunities that would double or triple the business, and another 50,000 square feet of manufacturing space
• Why Mark can use generative AI safely and would be nervous doing it at 22, plus Seth Godin on attention as something you ask people to pay

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Seth Godin, on attention as a currency
• Lovable, the AI build tool Kyler used to make the Forward Studios site look like an email inbox
• Jeff Hedrick of Keep Supply, from the previous episode on attention
• Google, TikTok, and Facebook, as channels discussed
• Dell and the "Dude, you're getting a Dell" campaign, referenced by Mark's former boss
• The CMO of Harley-Davidson, on doing the opposite of everyone else

Raw materials break most e-commerce assumptions. One alloy comes in dozens of shapes, lengths, and certification states, and a 20-foot bar weighing thousands of pounds doesn't drop neatly into a 3PL warehouse. Kyler Nixon sits down with Greg Raece of Online Metals to talk through what happens when a distributor decides the answer isn't more inventory.

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Greg describes the problem as an infinite warehouse: there is always another material a customer wants that requires additional processing before it can ship. Rather than stock it all, Online Metals opened its own website to third-party sellers, with their pricing, their descriptions, and their fulfillment, intertwined into one catalog and one checkout.

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The conversation covers how they spotted latent demand, why they rejected the direct drop-ship model, what selling on Amazon costs a certified product, and how they market a marketplace when 100-plus sellers all want the same email slot.

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👤 Guest Bio

Greg Raece is President of Online Metals, the Seattle-based e-commerce supplier of cut-to-size metals and plastics, founded in 1998 and now part of thyssenkrupp Materials NA. He was appointed president in November 2016 and led the launch of the company's third-party marketplace, which has since grown past 100 curated sellers and doubled the size of the catalog. His background before Online Metals includes Microsoft, Starbucks, and startups.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why a raw materials catalog behaves like an infinite warehouse, and why six warehouses still can't cover it
• How Online Metals read latent demand from site searches, sales conversations, and customer service calls
• The direct model they rejected: when a supplier's price moves after you've already promised it on the website
• Letting sellers control price, description, and fulfillment so the seller owns their own profitability
• What Amazon strips out: no heat lot, no alloy history, no mill test report, and a B2B order compressed into a B2C format with lower AOV
• One cart, one checkout, shipping from different locations, with marketplace product intertwined into the main catalog rather than behind a login
• Sellers using the marketplace as a live pilot before Online Metals decides to stock an item itself
• The product data gate every seller clears before graduating into loyalty, email, and promotions, plus why selling coal to blacksmiths made the newsletter

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• OnlineMetals.com
• Amazon, referenced as both a channel Online Metals sells on and the model they deliberately built against
• Greg Raece on LinkedIn
• Kyler Nixon on LinkedIn

Nobody funds a strategy they can't repeat back to you. That's the problem Stacy Hanks set out to solve, and it started long before e-commerce. Her time at Altria taught her that simple frameworks and clearly articulated goals make execution easy. Then she moved into digital commerce, where the words alone are enough to lose a room.

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Kyler Nixon walks Stacy through the one-page plan she puts in front of her executive team and her board. North star metric at the top. Mission, vision and values carved out for the digital team. Three pillars across the middle: customer experience, inventory, and operations. A strategic deployment cycle along the bottom.

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They get into why digital commerce keeps getting treated like a sidecar, how Stacy used photos of Home Depot planograms to explain the digital shelf to a CFO, why awareness is really a fight for attention, and the reason inventory earns its own pillar instead of living under operations.

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👤 Guest Bio

Stacy Hanks is Vice President of Global Digital Commerce at SureWerx, a private-equity-backed manufacturer of safety, PPE and industrial products with roughly 18 brands. She spent six years at Amazon in vendor management and business development, then led e-commerce at Master Lock before joining SureWerx in 2021. She began her career in outside B2B sales at Altria. In November 2025 the B2B eCommerce Association named her B2B eCommerce Leader of the Year.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why people can't understand 18-point frameworks, and what Stacy puts on the one page instead
• The Home Depot planogram photos she used to explain digital shelf software to a CFO who didn't know what a digital shelf was
• How the one-pager stops what Kyler calls organizational whiplash, when a new marketplace at the top gets absorbed entirely by the e-com team
• Why Stacy separates inventory from operations instead of collapsing them into front end and back end
• Adapting versus reacting, and why she puts the same slide in every board deck and every digital commerce meeting
• The framework she runs every acquisition through when the question is "is this a good fit for digital commerce?"
• Awareness as a competition for attention you can only win Monday through Friday until 5:00
• Whether customers are searching by your brand, your solution, or your product, and why companies get that wrong
• Why inventory availability, a clear shipping time, and a clear price decide the buy moment

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• SureWerx
• Master Lock
• Amazon
• Altria
• Grainger
• The Home Depot
• OSHA
• B2B eCommerce Association

Kyle Brown wasn't looking to buy a business. He was building a consulting practice, working through his LinkedIn contacts, and reached out to two owners he'd once tried to acquire a company from years earlier. A few conversations later, they asked him a different question: did he want to just buy the business?

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That business was 1877ForParts.com, an HVAC and industrial parts distributor whose sales had dropped roughly fifty percent in the months before Kyle stepped in. Kyler Nixon talks with Kyle Brown about buying a distressed turnaround with no broker, closing in under forty-five days, and running the business himself pre-close to figure out what was actually broken.

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Most of the growth story comes back to the basics. Answering the phone. Calling back every weekend's missed calls. Talking to customers every day. Kyle's argument is that the service bar in industrial distribution is low enough that doing the unglamorous work well becomes its own advantage.

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👤 Guest Bio

Kyle Brown spent years in finance, investment banking, and private equity before moving into the operational side of e-commerce distribution about a decade ago. He worked at a couple of e-commerce distributors, including one sold to private equity in 2022, where he stayed on for a couple of years. In July of 2025 he acquired 1877ForParts.com, an HVAC and industrial parts distributor selling both to contractors and homeowners, and now runs it as owner-operator.

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📌 What We Cover

• How Kyle went from building a consulting practice to acquiring a business he wasn't looking for, all from one LinkedIn message
• Valuing a break-even turnaround where you can't just slap a multiple on EBITDA, and why the price has to be discounted for risk
• Closing in under forty-five days with no broker, negotiating directly with two owners, and waiting two weeks to close on the end of the month
• Why Kyle started running the business pre-close and brought in former colleagues who needed no ramp-up
• The revenue Kyle says came directly from calling back every missed call from Friday 5 PM to Monday 8 AM
• Why answering the phone with an actual human surprises customers in the age of Amazon
• The two near-term priorities: listing parts they already sell but never put on the site, and leaning into B2B and outbound
• Kyle's case that ad spend and AI are wasted if you're not picking up the phone or shipping fast

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Kyle Brown on X (@MSUKyleBrown)
• 1877ForParts.com
• BigCommerce, Shopify, and Magento (e-commerce platforms discussed)
• Amazon (referenced on customer service and technical questions)

Most people treat B2B and B2C marketing like two different sports. Kyler Nixon opens this one by admitting he loves pushing buttons on that exact idea, and his guest agrees they're far more similar than different. Isaac Ransom of Epik Workwear studied economics, not marketing, and that outsider view is what made the B2B/B2C separation feel foreign to him. His argument: behind every B2B buyer is a B2C buyer, so why strip away the ease and emotion that make consumer marketing work? The conversation runs from why leading with visuals beats leading with specs, to Isaac's four-funnel model of branding, advertising, marketing, and product, to the unglamorous work of actually calling customers and standing in a freezer to understand the gear.

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👤 Guest Bio

Isaac Ransom is Chief Marketing Officer at Epik Workwear, a Bay Area brand that makes specialized workwear and uniforms for cold storage, logistics, food processing, and construction. He came to marketing from an economics background, which shaped his skepticism about the usual B2B rulebook. At Epik he leads product messaging and marketing, working closely with the product and sales teams and spending time on-site with the people who actually wear the gear.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why "behind every B2B buyer is a B2C buyer," and what that means for how you write
• The case for leading with strong visuals, then backing them up with specs and spec sheets
• Isaac's four-funnel model: branding is your story, advertising is attention, marketing is your mirror, product ties it together
• Why "marketing is your mirror" means the numbers keep you accountable, or the rest is fluff
• Dropping features like double-stitch threading from the pitch when they stop moving the buyer
• Customer service as a "silver bullet" you prove by experience, not by claiming it
• Saying the customer's problem and solution in seven words or less
• Getting close to the customer: calling five to 10 buyers a day, site visits, and reading a greenhouse manager's search history

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller — the storytelling framework Kyler recommends as an easy starting point
• Epik Workwear — Isaac's company
• Fastenal and McMaster-Carr — referenced as large-catalog distributors

Most B2B distributors compete on price, availability, and assortment. Keep Supply took a different bet: that the technicians turning wrenches in refrigeration facilities care about brand, vibe, and experience just as much as anyone shopping at a grocery store.

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Kyler Nixon sits down with Jeff Hedrick, Director of Brand and Marketing at Keep Supply, to trace the full arc of how a startup industrial refrigeration parts distributor built a consumer-grade brand from scratch in one of the least glamorous corners of B2B commerce. From a sole-entrepreneur operation selling parts out of a home workshop, to 150 employees and a national fulfillment center, the story is less about the product and more about the people who need it and what actually earns their attention.

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The conversation covers the origin of their pro-wrestling-inspired Parts Mania campaign, what it means to build a brand around a commodity, why trade show booths matter more than most distributors think, and what comes next with contractor-focused strategy and the Keep Pro loyalty program.

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👤 Guest Bio

Jeff Hedrick is Director of Brand and Marketing at Keep Supply, a Springfield, MO-based e-commerce-first distributor of industrial and commercial refrigeration parts. He began his career in advertising at The Marlin Company, then served as Creative Director at Convoy of Hope before joining Keep Supply as one of its earliest employees. He's spent the last several years building a brand known as much for its wrestling puns and custom merch as for next-day parts fulfillment.

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📌 What We Cover

• How Keep Supply went from a home-workshop sole-proprietorship to a national distributor, and why the founders' software background shaped their e-commerce-first model from day one
• Why Jeff saw a commodity product as a brand-building opportunity rather than a marketing dead end
• The thinking behind the rebrand from Industrial Refrigeration Parts to Keep Supply, including the grocery store aisle walk that led to the name
• Why Keep Supply started at the facility level, targeting technicians and operators before going after corporate procurement
• The origin of the Parts Mania campaign, how it borrowed from pro wrestling, and why grandiose showmanship was exactly right for the moment
• The full campaign roster: Parts Mania, Parts Camp, Spring Parts Classic, Partstock, Parts Ball, Parts Madness, Parts Pick 'Em, Parts Wood Derby, Parts to Table, and more
• How trade show booth activations became a core part of Keep Supply's go-to-market after the pandemic
• What "make every part rewarding" actually looks like in practice
• The contractor relationship: why Keep Supply views contractors as customers, not competitors, and how they're building programs around that
• The forthcoming Keep Pro loyalty program and the shift from transactional promos to annual account retention
• Why B2B SMS and loyalty programs that flopped a few years ago are worth revisiting now

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Keep Supply — industrial and commercial refrigeration parts distributor
• Eurolink Fastener Supply — metric fastener distributor, mentioned by Kyler in the context of trade show brand-building
• Reinders — previous DGD guest; cited for their B2B loyalty program execution (featuring Jackson Orin, Marketing Manager)
• Forward Studios — Kyler Nixon's company, presented by DGD

Most manufacturers know what they sell. Solve Industrial Motion Group is in the middle of figuring out how to tell people everything else they can do. VP of Marketing John McMillian joins Kyler Nixon to talk through a pivotal moment: Solve acquired four companies in roughly 60 days in 2025, shifted from a bearings-heavy portfolio to a full drive solution provider, and jumped from about 5% US manufacturing to 25-30%. Now they need their web presence to catch up to the business.

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The conversation covers Solve's decision to separate its brand site from its e-store, a no-AI content strategy backed by an engineer-turned-product-marketer, how to measure brand equity when views don't tell the whole story, and what a distributor's relationship with EDI means for e-commerce traffic. Plus, John closes with a story about a joke of the day that proves customer data beats best practices every time.

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👤 Guest Bio

John McMillian is Vice President of Marketing at Solve Industrial Motion Group, a Charlotte-based manufacturer of engineered bearings and power transmission components backed by Audax Private Equity. He joined Solve in October 2024 after serving as Director of Marketing at MacLean Power Systems and spending more than a decade in marketing leadership at General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems. He holds an MBA from Wake Forest University and a BA from Elon University.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why Solve is building a separate brand site alongside its e-store, and what two distinct customer journeys that's designed to serve
• The "tripod" content strategy: brand site, vertical campaign systems, and a product marketer with an engineering background — and why all three tent poles have to stand together
• Why John ruled out AI for Solve's content despite using it personally, and what credibility costs when you slip up once in an industrial audience
• How 15-year-old installation videos are still pulling thousands of monthly views on YouTube — and what that tells John about the demand for educational content in manufacturing
• The $250,000 benchmark for a dedicated videographer and edit suite, and how John is building the business case before the budget is there
• Two web metrics John reports monthly to make the case for brand investment: competitive sessions/users benchmarking and traffic inflow/outflow patterns
• How EDI is becoming a real force with distributor customers, and why deep EDI integration can quietly cannibalize e-commerce traffic without anyone noticing
• Why a joke of the day on a product footer drove inbound calls when it disappeared — and what it says about knowing your customer

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Solve Industrial Motion Group
• B&B Manufacturing — acquired by Solve; source of the Todd Talks video series
• HubSpot — Solve's email and marketing automation platform
• Optimizely — e-commerce platform for legacy Solve
• BigCommerce — e-commerce platform for one of the acquired brands
• Faith Tank, Zip's AW Direct — referenced by Kyler as a prior guest example of in-house content expertise
• Amanda Clark, Barron Equipment Company — referenced as a prior guest doubling down on SEO

Four months before the call that nearly ended it, Nick Muscari's company was the one getting praised at every weekly meeting. Great gross margin. Strong cash flow. The favorite little side company. Then the parent distributor collapsed, the assets went to a competitor, and Factory Cleaning Equipment was set to be liquidated.

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Kyler Nixon sits down with Nick Muscari to walk through a company takeback, front to end. Nick had 48 hours to decide whether to try buying the business, one phone call to the original founder, and two weeks to close the deal in cash. The reopening took about 45 minutes. Nobody missed a paycheck.

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This one covers what it actually takes to save a business on a deadline, why a profitable company can still end up on the chopping block, and what Nick is building now that the ropes are off.

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👤 Guest Bio

Nick Muscari leads Factory Cleaning Equipment, a floor-cleaning equipment dealer and service company with locations in Aurora, Illinois and the Carolinas. He started in the distribution industry at Jon-Don in 2008 in customer service, worked his way into sales and sales management, and later joined Factory Cleaning Equipment to build its sales team. In May 2025, he helped the original founder buy the company back and relaunch it as Factory Cleaning Equipment, LLC.

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📌 What We Cover

• How Factory Cleaning Equipment went from being the praised, high-margin division to days away from liquidation
• The 48-hour window to decide on the buyback, and the dinner six months earlier that made the founder pick up the phone
• Closing the deal in cash inside two weeks, reopening under a new name with about 48 jobs saved
• Rebuilding a field sales team in 2020 while everyone else went inside, showing up with a mask on instead of cold calling from a desk
• Why a locally based industry makes national expansion the wrong play, and the decision to drop 11 locations and refocus on Chicagoland and the Carolinas
• Promoting a driver and a service technician into territory managers, and why the next leaders were already on the route
• Where Nick is placing his next bet: autonomous floor-cleaning equipment

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Factory Cleaning Equipment
• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

What does it actually look like when a small distributor decides to go deep on one product instead of wide across a whole market? That's the question at the center of this episode. Kyler Nixon sits down with Kevin Fielder from Iron Mountain Refrigeration & Equipment, a Wisconsin-based commercial refrigeration distributor that has deliberately stayed in its lane while the industry around it keeps expanding in every direction.

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The conversation moves from private-label brand strategy to frontline service culture to the case for owning your local market before you try to compete nationally. If you've been wrestling with whether to niche down or grow out, this one will give you something to think about.

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👤 Guest Bio

Kevin Fielder is part of the sales and business development team at Iron Mountain Refrigeration & Equipment, a family-owned commercial refrigeration distributor based in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. Iron Mountain stocks and sells their own private-label brands, PeakCold and ProCool, directly from their 50,000 sq. ft. warehouse, and recently added True Manufacturing to their lineup as an authorized highline distributor. The company serves restaurants, bars, cafes, convenience stores, grocery stores, and anywhere else commercial refrigeration is a daily necessity.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why Iron Mountain chose to stay strictly in commercial refrigeration rather than expanding into adjacent product categories, and how that decision shapes everything from warehouse operations to customer retention
• The mechanics of owning your own private-label brand: controlling manufacturing, cutting out middlemen, and being able to troubleshoot product issues in-house over the phone
• How Iron Mountain partnered with True Manufacturing to serve the premium-tier buyer without losing focus on their core house brands, PeakCold and ProCool
• A real customer service story involving a wrong-door refrigerator, a same-day swap in February, and no restocking fee
• How leadership culture determines whether frontline reps will make a judgment call or wait for permission, and why Iron Mountain runs a non-revolving-door team
• The Wisconsin initiative: a deliberate local-first growth strategy built around trade shows, Tavern League of Wisconsin events, and face-to-face relationships before going national
• Why running a 30x20 booth next to a 700-foot competitor at a Las Vegas trade show isn't a growth strategy, and what to do instead
• Exploring Spotify advertising for targeted local reach, and Iron Mountain's upcoming podcast, Keeping It Cool with Iron Mountain

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Iron Mountain Refrigeration & Equipment
• True Manufacturing
• Tavern League of Wisconsin
• Jasmine Widmer at Industrial Supply (Episode 29 of Darn Good Distributors)
• Spotify advertising for B2B local reach