Harper Trucks
Trailblazers of Hand Trucks Manufacturing

Chris Squires, Senior Vice President & General Manager

Today, it has become a word that gets thrown around a lot, rather lavishly. From aerospace and automotive to medicine and manufacturing, innovation is in danger of becoming a cliché as a word, if it isn’t already! Still—far from a mere buzzword—innovation is a concept that is still elusive and hard to achieve for many.

Having said that, there are companies out there that are breeding innovation as an inherent culture. Harper Trucks, a hand truck manufacturer, belongs to that class of companies. Its journey from a small regional metal fabricator to the world’s largest manufacturer of hand trucks is a testament to the company’s pioneering potency in its sphere.

How it all started…

Harper Trucks ventured into the material handling space in 1940. Launched as an outgrowth of the global welding products manufacturer Tweco Products, Inc., Harper Trucks started as a provider of a wide range of carts in the industrial manufacturing domain, such as welding carts, material handling carts, and flatbed carts. Eventually, Harper Trucks pivoted its focus to the hand trucks market. By the early 90s, the company had already carved a niche out for itself as a leading provider of heavy-duty hand trucks. While sustaining industrial manufacturing-driven heavy-duty hand trucks as its core market segment for many years, Harper Trucks gradually expanded its product portfolio to light-duty hand trucks as well—cementing its foothold as a prime mover in the hand truck manufacturing realm.

But it has not been an easy path to cut! Harper Trucks had to brave through the market crises and disruptions many a time to reach where it is today. For one, the earliest retail wave that swept across the U.S. had stimulated a paradigm shift in the hand trucks market. Hand trucks were conventionally industrial-driven heavy-duty products. But with the advent of the big-box stores, a novel line of light-duty hand trucks surfaced in the market that could cater to varied functions. It subsequently made hand trucks an off-the-shelf item, thereby fiercely increasing the market competition. Alongside this trend, the industry also marked a period when the distributor base—the middlemen between hand truck manufacturers and industrial manufacturing companies— slowly moved out of the hand trucks market. Many hand truck manufacturers found this seismic shift challenging since it had been a critical disruption to their prevailing business models. But for Harper Trucks, these shifts only served as an added opportunity to diversify their standing in the market. “We looked at the market and had to decide what we were going to do in it. It was certain that hand trucks market was indeed going to be a big one,” says Chris Squires, senior vice president and general manager at Harper Trucks.

In the wake of these transitions, Harper Trucks reinvented its business model. On the one hand, Harper Trucks decided to develop unique models of light-duty hand trucks to differentiate themselves in the market from the big-box stores. On the other, the company offered these inventive hand trucks to these major market drivers (big-box stores) themselves, white-labeled.

This inventive approach consolidated Harper Trucks’ stance in the hand trucks market as the premium manufacturer of heavy-duty and light-duty hand trucks. Thanks to this two-pronged business approach, Harper Trucks has a substantial client base at present, who use their hand trucks extensively via private labeling. Today, one of every three hand trucks sold in the country is manufactured by Harper Trucks.

Harper Trucks currently puts forth a diverse range of hand trucks and holds worldwide patents for many of them. “We constantly try to innovate and come up with a new hand truck each time that could address a specific challenge,” Squires notes. The company is incessantly working on incorporating new materials, such as plastics and composites, or providing exclusive properties to the hand trucks, like lightweight, high tensile strength, long durability, and so on, to add a unique competitive advantage to its products. Hand trucks with such robust properties enable Harper Trucks’ clients to leverage them in a wide array of market segments for a vast range of use-case scenarios.

To facilitate it, the company has a talented pool of engineering experts with varied expertise in the fields of main welding, injection molding, assembly, and robotics. They work in tandem with Harper Trucks’ marketing team to comprehend the real-world trucking challenges in each market segment and come up with inventive hand trucks that could tackle them. “We don’t just get some components and slam them together to deliver it as a product,” Squires asserts. “There’s enough thought put behind each of Harper Trucks’s products,” he adds.

A Problem-Solving Mind-Set that Breeds Success

How a leading farm products retailer in the U.S. significantly improved its sales by private labeling Harper Trucks’ multi-purpose hand trucks (trucks with multiple functions) is a perfect case in point to reflect on the company’s hand truck manufacturing capabilities. The client onboarded Harper Trucks’ hand trucks to leverage its varied functionalities. For one, it could be used as a flatbed hand truck to move bulky loads. Similarly, it can be made taller or even get inclined to a 30-degree angle to use at different locations for different purposes.

Taking it a notch above, Harper Trucks also redesigned the truck wheels to address a specific issue of the client. They changed the air-filled pneumatic tires to flat-free tires for the client so that the tires don’t lose air pressure while shipping. Once private-labeled and brought to market, the client was able to sell 12 times the number of hand trucks than what they had initially anticipated in the first year. “We had a patent on it, which gave them an added edge in the market as well,” remarks Squires. What started as a pilot project between the two companies subsequently translated into an enduring partnership.

It is but one of many partnerships that Harper Trucks has been fostering with the leading suppliers in the industrial and retail sectors over the years. The company has already established an extensive client base in other countries like Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and Australia. And today, it is well-positioned to expand this client base throughout the world. “We have seen exceptional growth in the last few years. And we plan to keep on pushing our bounds of innovation to create more ground-breaking hand truck designs ahead,” concludes Squires.