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Werk-Brau celebrates 75 years

Werk-Brau Co., Inc. celebrated their 75^th anniversary recently with an Open House for employees and their families, retirees, customers, suppliers and colleagues, and the community.

Visitors were able to tour the over 500,000 square foot manufacturing campus complex, see displays of Werk-Brau products and the equipment they are used with, and enjoy barbecue, refreshments, ice-cream, prize drawings, and more.

“We’re humbled and thankful that so many people chose to celebrate with us,” said Jon Ballinger, Werk-Brau President.  “People make this company what it is, and we’ve been blessed with wonderful, dedicated employees over the years. It was great to host not only our current employees and their families, but many retirees and their families, as well as those within the Findlay community.”

Additional activities for younger visitors included bounce-houses, pony rides, and a train ride, as nearly 1,000 turned out for the event.

The core vision upon which Werk-Brau was founded still drives them today, says Ballinger.

“(We) safely provide excellence in quality, design, and delivery of products and services which exceed our customers’ expectations,” he says.

The company has grown from a single blacksmith shop to numerous North American locations with 500,000 square feet of manufacturing space and over 500 employees, maintaining dealer direct partnerships with more than 2,000 North American heavy equipment dealers from their Findlay, Ohio headquarters.

One aspect of the business that has changed dramatically is technology, which is helping customers to be more efficient, productive, and safe on their job sites.

Werk-Brau supplies hydraulic D-LOCK couplers, tilt-rotator couplers, hydraulic thumbs, and a wide range of other specialty tools and construction attachments.

Technology also plays a much larger role in heavy equipment manufacturing than it did seven decades ago. Werk-Brau combines state of the art manufacturing technology such as robotics and high-definition plasma cutting, together with old-world craftsmanship into each bucket, thumb, coupler, and attachment they manufacture.

Their goals today are the same as they were when Duke Werkheiser and Dutch Brautigam opened their blacksmith shop in 1947, says Ballinger, “to provide excellence in customer service and exceed customer expectations.”

Werk-Brau manufactures a complete line of OEM and replacement attachments for excavators, mini excavators, backhoes, mini and full-size loaders, and crawler loaders.