Under new ownership since 2020, Warwood Tool of Wheeling, a 170-year-old company in a shrinking market, is staying sharp.
BACK IN 1990, a soldier stationed in Korea wrote home to his family in Wheeling that he was using a 5-foot breaker bar to fix the steel tracks on tanks when he realized it had the name of longtime Wheeling company Warwood Tool pressed into it. Stories like this are fun for Chris Azur, president of the 170-year-old company that has supplied hand-forged tools to foundational U.S. industries like coal mining and rail—from their very start to the present—and to the U.S. military.
Established in Ohio in 1854, then moved to Wheeling in 1904 and its current location in 1907, Warwood Tool has a distinguished past. American soldiers have relied on its products in every war since the Civil War. It had such a formative role in U.S. history that it was included in the 2012 History Channel documentary The Men Who Built America.
The company has changed hands just seven times—most recently in 2020, when Azur’s family bought it. “We’re from Pittsburgh, and we’d been looking for a local company to invest in to get a family business going,” he says. His degree in marketing and his serious hobby–level interest in blacksmithing and knife-making made the work a good fit for him. Although he came in young—he was just 21 at the time—he brought in Chief Operating Officer Rob Taylor, who had 30-plus years in the hand tool industry.
Like much U.S. manufacturing, Warwood Tool was struggling. “It was on a pretty solid downhill trajectory year over year,” Azur says, due to competition from tools made in China, India, and Mexico. “The management was dropping product lines, adding new lines—nobody knew what the company was doing.”
Azur and Taylor spent a lot of days on the manufacturing floor getting to know the processes side-by-side with the employees. They started updating equipment from as far back as the 1940s to make the work easier, cleaner, and safer and to improve what was already a quality product.
Then two started addressing declining sales by bringing old product lines back. They identified railroad industry tools as their core product line, representing about a third of sales. The spike maul, for example, that’s used to drive in the spikes that secure the rails, and the claw bar that pulls spikes out when a section of rail has to be replaced, are flagship products. “They use a special USA-made steel alloy,” Azur says. “Only one other company makes these tools.”
And they started adding signature tools. In 2021, they introduced the Pulaski axe—axe at the front end, mattock at the back—used by firefighters, trail builders, and others. Now they’re getting ready to reintroduce the company’s trench mattock. “Warwood Tool made this during World War II, and it was a standard-issue tool given to many soldiers,” Azur says. They were able to reference the original blueprints to recreate it. “This tool is two pounds, an exact replica, small and packable. It can be a gardening tool, it’s great for people who do rock collecting, it would work for backpacking, and it’ll appeal to trail-building groups as well.” They expect to launch it by early 2025.
The market for hand-forged, Americanmade tools has only gotten worse since 2020. “At the end of 2023, Home Depot officially got rid of the last USA-made hammer they sold in stores,” Azur says. “Most hand tool manufacturers in the U.S. have gone out of business.”
But Warwood Tool is turning things around. Some of the longtime employees have even retired, and that’s a good sign. They were staying on until they felt their departure wouldn’t hurt the company, Azur says—but the company’s strong now.
The Making of a Tool That Will Last
It takes steel, fire, and craftsmanship.
WARWOOD TOOL PRESIDENT CHRIS AZUR ON STAYING COMPETITIVE IN A DECLINING MARKET.
We have a great story, but we needed to be visible. We built a website to showcase our products and our history. We have Facebook and Instagram pages—a lot of our audience is on Instagram. And we got onto YouTube over the summer with a mini-series.
We work hard to stay relevant. If we only sell hammers and you don’t use hammers, you’re never going to be a customer. It might mean getting into a new product line or just making a new version of something we’ve made for a long time.
We promote “made in the USA.” Every year we see dozens of companies closing—historic companies, 100-year companies closing their doors. Forever. Even if you don’t like hand tools or don’t want a hammer, it’s cool that we’re making these tools in the USA, by hand, not robots, using traditional processes. It’s an important thing to be able to put on your product.
READ MORE ARTICLES FROM WV LIVING’S FALL 2024 ISSUE
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