Zoro turned the unglamorous work of buying gloves, gauges, fasteners and floor cleaner into a $1.4 billion digital business. Its real product is not the wrench - it is making 13 million industrial items feel searchable, buyable and close at hand.
CRC Industries began with one corrosion inhibitor mixed in a Pennsylvania garage. More than six decades later, its real product is a carefully engineered answer to an expensive question: what keeps a machine working instead of waiting?