Fastener Fair USA 2025 - Trade Show Recap

Team Austin
2 days ago
2 min read

A few weeks ago, we exhibited for the first time at Fastener Fair USA, which billed itself as “North America's premier trade show and conference for the fastener industry and its allied manufacturing sectors." Our reason for exhibiting was simple: to showcase our capabilities as a fastener supplier and demonstrate how we differ from other, more traditional fastener distributors, thanks to some unique capabilities we possess. These areas include our expertise in Huck Tooling, our new, upgraded design for Floorboard Screws, our access to the Value-Clamp line of structural blind rivets, our ECK coating, which is critical for corrosion prevention when using fasteners on dissimilar metals, and, of course, our complete line of access hardware.

Our on-site team of Patrick Breitbach, Mike Macci, Jay White, and Andrew Person connected with prospects interested in our products and suppliers who could help strengthen our position in the fastener market.

Some of the prospects included:

615 Signs (Murfreesboro, TN) expressed interest in rivet nuts, battery-powered rivet tools, and VMI bins.
Allvan (LaVergne, TN) is a current customer interested in our floorboard screws with improved plating, MGLP, and BOM fasteners. They also have some tooling issues that we can help them resolve.
Austal USA, LLC (Mobile, AL), which manufactures marine equipment for the United States Coast Guard and Navy, expressed interest in our ECK product line.
J.E.T. Industrial (Marinette, WI) is interested in Huck Tool resale.
Northrop Grumman (Palmdale, CA) showed interest in our VMI and fastener kitting capabilities.
Schorer / Bolt Blue (North Branch, MN) spoke with the team about Value-Clamp structural rivets.
Shamrock International (Itasca, IL) discussed with the team collated rivets and tool backup for Industrial Rivet.
Cleveland Fasteners & Supply, LLC (Cleveland TN) is also interested in our new floorboard screws and ECK corrosion-resistant product line.

We connected with several suppliers as well:

EZ Lok is a vendor whose products we have been purchasing through McMaster-Carr. We can set up an account so that we can purchase directly.
Advance Components is a supplier of Duplex screws for the concrete industry.
Brighton Best offers vending solutions with no cost for machines if we hit a target spend on all non-fasteners.

Another company we met at Fastener Fair USA, which has the potential to assist us with RFQs, is BoltWise. BoltWise is an AI company that provides a solution to decode/translate customer RFQ lists to our Austin Hardware part numbers, which is a significant bottleneck in our fastener quoting process. Patrick did a live demonstration and was able to identify Austin part numbers from a customer RFQ sheet in approximately 30 minutes. Previously, the same list had taken Patrick, who has several years of experience in the fastener industry, about 3 hours. Additional research is required, but BoltWise appears to be a potential solution to help us quote fasteners faster and more efficiently.

Although the team observed that our target end users were not significantly represented at the event, they feel that directing our efforts towards other fastener resellers and distributors may lead to future opportunities at the event.