Grizzly Reaches Ruby Anniversary

Established in Bellingham, Wash., in 1983, Grizzly Industrial is celebrating its 40th year of success as a manufacturer and direct distributor of woodworking and metalworking equipment.

“We have just under 600 different machines. That’s more machines under one brand than any other manufacturer,” says company president Robert McCoy, who started his career with Grizzly in 1989.

“Our top sellers are band saws, table saws and planers. We dominate that market, and because we have such a variety between each of those, we have customers from the beginner in a small house or apartment, up to Boeing or NASA who get the biggest machines in each category.”

Company founder Shiraz Balolia, who joined McCoy and other Grizzly team members on a conference call with Woodshop News, discussed the major milestones that have helped the company evolve.

Balolia says a major factor in accelerating company growth was opening an East Coast facility in Williamsport, Pa., in 1987.

“A majority of [our] customers, at the time, were on the East Coast, while [our] headquarters were on the West Coast,” says Balolia. “There was a lot of freight damage taking place and it was expensive to ship. Opening that facility really jumpstarted our business and we grew very quickly.”

A third facility was added in Springfield, Mo., which can reach most places in the U.S. in three or four days.

Grizzly’s direct-to-consumer approach has kept prices lower than the competition’s and made the company solely responsible for everything from the start of the manufacturing process to delivery, Balolia says.

“As we grew, we knew that we had to improve our quality, and the next best thing that we did was open our offices in Taiwan and China in 1998. We hired our own engineers there and put in a quality control regiment which evolved as the years went by.

“That’s a big deal, and what it does is eliminate 99.9 percent of the problems. So, when the machines arrive here, we don’t just ship them out to the customer. We still check batches of the machines so everything is perfect, and our engineers are graded on their performance,” says Balolia.

Another strategy was to ensure that a wide selection of replacement parts remain available for Grizzly machines.

“If you don’t have parts for a product, you don’t have quality control. From my thinking, if I was a customer, I’d want the company to carry parts because with machinery you need parts. You’re going to deal with it sometime down the road. Whether it’s a bearing, headstock bearing, or a handle breaks off,” Balolia says.

Grizzly has a been a leader in new product development. “We were the innovators of putting spiral cutterheads on jointers, and now it’s a standard feature with every company out there,” says Balolia.

McCoy says Grizzly is currently focused on adding new machines so that the product line encompasses every category of metalworking and woodworking, including new mills, jointers, planers, table saws, and CNC machines.

“We have something in the works to fill in every gap, and also something in the works to expand to new areas we haven’t focused on before,” says McCoy. “We are really on benchtop because that really is the next generation of woodworkers. The benchtop machines are kind of the first drug into the woodworking bug where you can spend a couple hundred dollars and cut something or turn something. In the U.S., what we’re finding is they’re not building three-car [garages] as much as they used to, so we need to make smaller machines to adapt to less woodworking space for the consumer.”

Grizzly has added four new machines to celebrate its 40th anniversary, including a band saw, jointer, and two table saws. For more, visit grizzly.com.  

This article was originally published in the July 2023 issue.