Conner Industries

Every machine that arrives intact, every appliance that survives a cross-country truck, every crated engine that clears customs - somewhere upstream, a piece of engineered wood held it in place. Conner Industries, Inc. has spent 45 years living in that gap between the factory floor and the loading dock, and it turns out to be a very good place to be.

The company began in 1981 as a single lumber operation on the outskirts of Fort Worth - the site it still runs today as its Haslet manufacturing facility. For years it did one thing: remanufacture and distribute industrial lumber. That was the whole business. Cut boards, sell boards, repeat.

What Conner is today looks different. It manufactures and distributes cut industrial lumber, fully assembled wood pallets, crates, skids and containers, and - increasingly - integrated packaging that combines wood, foam, corrugate and plastic into a single engineered solution. It runs roughly 18 manufacturing locations across about 14 states, employs around 290 people, and reports revenue approaching $200 million. In the U.S. industrial wood market, the company describes itself as holding roughly the #2 market share.

The pivot from commodity lumber to engineered packaging is the through-line of the modern company, and most of it happened under one leader.

At its core Conner is a B2B manufacturer and distributor. It sells cut industrial lumber - softwood and hardwood, mill-direct, cut stock and pallet parts - to manufacturers and to the pallet builders who serve them. It builds custom and machine-made pallets, crates, skids, boxes and industrial containers, including export-compliant packaging that meets international shipping rules.

The newer, higher-margin layer is what the company calls its Integrated Packaging Division: mixed-material, engineered protective packaging that treats wood, foam, corrugate and plastic as interchangeable tools rather than separate product lines. The insight is simple. A customer shipping a delicate machine doesn't care whether the protection comes from a wooden crate or a foam insert - they care that it arrives undamaged, at the lowest total cost. Conner reorganized around that reframe.

On top of the physical product sits a services business: packaging engineering and unit-load testing, plus logistics - third-party logistics (3PL) warehousing, vendor-managed inventory (VMI), kitting and assembly, repackaging and just-in-sequence delivery. Assemble the parts into a kit, and a customer's packaging team stops hunting for components and simply packs.

Conner's customers are industrial and materials-handling manufacturers - the kind of companies whose products are heavy, fragile, expensive, or all three. Its keyword footprint spans aerospace and defense, automotive, heavy industrial, chemical and plastics, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, HVAC and agricultural sectors.

The problem it solves is deceptively plain: things break in transit, and packaging is usually an afterthought until it fails. A poorly designed crate can cost more in damaged freight than it ever saved in materials. Sourcing wood, foam and corrugate from separate vendors adds cost, complexity and finger-pointing when something goes wrong. Export shipments get held at the border over non-compliant wood.

Conner's pitch is to absorb all of that into one partner - design the packaging, test the unit load, source the materials, manage the inventory, and deliver it where and when the line needs it. For a manufacturer, the value isn't the crate; it's not having to think about the crate.

The industrial wood and pallet business is famously fragmented - thousands of regional shops that build a pallet, sell a pallet, and compete on price. Conner's differentiation is that it stopped competing there. Three things separate it from the field.

Scale with reach. Roughly 18 plants across 14 states means a customer can be served nationally by one supplier with consistent specs - a hard thing for a single-location pallet shop to match. Competitors at that scale are few: UFP Industries, PalletOne, Millwood and a handful of others.

Mixed materials under one roof. Most vendors are a wood shop or a foam shop. Conner's Integrated Packaging Division deliberately combines wood, foam, plastic and corrugate, letting engineers pick the right material for each surface of a load rather than forcing the job to fit whatever they sell.

Services, not just stuff. The 3PL, VMI and kitting layer turns Conner from a supplier into a supply-chain partner - the kind of relationship that's far stickier than a purchase order for boards.

The business model has two engines. The first is organic: manufacture and distribute lumber and packaging, then layer on value-added services that carry better margins than commodity boards. The second is acquisitive. In 2014 the New York private-equity firm The Argentum Group recapitalized Conner, taking over 90% ownership when sales already exceeded $140 million, and backed a strategy of growth by acquisition.

Since then Conner has rolled up its Integrated Packaging Division through at least five deals - foam specialist Guardian Packaging (2023), custom foam fabricator Kirkland Sales (2025), Denver Reel & Pallet, Continental Timber and others - plus a 2023 joint venture with Anderson Pallet and Crate. The thesis: a fragmented protective-packaging market ready to be consolidated by an operator with capital and national reach.

Where it fits in the market is telling. Conner is not the flashiest name in packaging, and that's the point. It sits in the essential, unsexy middle of the supply chain - the layer that only gets noticed when it fails - and has quietly built one of the larger platforms in it.

Much of Conner's transformation traces to CEO David Dixon, who joined in April 2017. By the company's account, he inherited a financially challenged industrial lumber business and steered it into a diversified, integrated packaging platform reaching roughly $200 million in revenue.

Dixon's background is finance and turnarounds. He served as CFO at multiple private-equity-backed companies, including The Crosby Group, which exited to KKR after a five-year turnaround, and later consulted on a Dover division carve-out sold to private equity before taking the top job at Conner.

He isn't alone. The bench includes CRO Kevin Kenjarski (joined September 2025, 25+ years in global packaging), CFO Jason Smith, VP of Sales Nick Roppolo - a 30-year packaging veteran with 23 years at Conner - and VP of Business Development Mike Huggins, who leads M&A and long-term strategy. The mix of long-tenured operators and outside hires reflects a company that grew up local but now plays national.