McMaster-Carr


McMaster-Carr Supply Company is a private American supplier of hardware, tools, raw materials, industrial materials, and maintenance equipment. They function as a business-to-business company. The company was founded in 1901 and is based in Elmhurst, Illinois, with distribution centers in Robbinsville Township, New Jersey; Santa Fe Springs, California; Douglasville, Georgia and Aurora, Ohio. A new distribution center and regional headquarters began construction in June 2025 in Fort Worth, Texas, with completion expected in 2027.

History

The company was founded in 1901 at 160 East Lake street in Chicago as the McMaster-Davis Supply Company. Starting with $50,000 in investor capital, its founders were T.J. McMaster, a former stationary engineer, and F.C. Davis, who had been a chief engineer in the U.S. Navy. In 1904, an attorney with a background in mechanical engineering named Walter S. Carr purchased the company. As early as 1908, the name of the company had been changed from McMaster-Davis to McMaster-Carr.
Harry and James Channon, the sons of Henry Channon the founder of the H. Channon company, a large Chicago distributor of maritime and steam engine supplies, later purchased the company.

Catalog

In 1908 the company printed and copyrighted its first catalog, at 506 pages in length. It releases its current catalog annually. The distinctive yellow print edition of the catalog is limited in distribution, sent primarily to established customers.

Website

McMaster-Carr's website ranked third among e-commerce sites in a 2002 study performed at Stanford University about trust and credibility, just behind Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The site intersperses design tips and explanations of material properties within product offerings and deploys predictive search and filtering tools. Web developers in social media recognized the website for its heavy optimization towards speed and performance, even though it uses outdated JavaScript libraries.

Mobile phone app

The McMaster app was released in May 2013 for the iPad & iPhone, and March 2014 for Android devices.

Awards

In 2015 McMaster-Carr was recognized by customers, in a survey by B2B business reviewer VendOp, as one of the top B2B vendors in the United States in multiple categories.