LA-CO Industries Celebrates 85th Anniversary
In 1934, Dr. Lester Aronberg founded LA-CO Industries, Inc on the philosophy of delivering high-performance products for specific industrial applications. The first product produced was the Stik-O-Paint which offered "real paint in stick form." The Stik-O-Paint would eventually become the well-known Markal® B® PAINTSTIK®. Dr. Aronberg would later turn the concept of real paint in stick form into dozens of different paintstiks for a variety of industries.
Dr. Aronberg expanded the growing line of paintstiks with the launch of the ALL-WEATHER® PAINT-Stik livestock marker in 1945. The ALL-WEATHER® brand was designed specifically to help fill the needs of farmers.
He expanded the company even further with the launch of the PIPETITE-Stik®, effectively launching the LA-CO brand of plumbing chemicals. The LA-CO® line continued to expand with the launch of Regular Flux Paste in 1949 and Slic-tite Paste in 1971.
The continued growth of the plumbing brand did not slow down work on the Markal line. In 1987, Markal® switched gears and introduced the company's first liquid paint marker, the Valve Action® Paint Marker. The success of the liquid paint product led to the launch of the PRO-LINE® HP in 2008 and officially solidified the Markal® liquid paint marker line.
In 2009, LA-CO Industries acquired Intrama S.A.S. in France, now known as LA-CO Industries Europe S.A.S. This acquisition allied LA-CO Industries to expand the overseas presence of the company and allowed them to utilize Intrama's overseas facility to allow for easier and quicker customer service and delivery to international customers.
In January 2013, LA-CO Industries acquired Tempil® from ITW. The Tempil brand has been a leader in temperature indication technologies for nearly 76 years. Tempil was able to bring their expertise in developing innovative, customer-driven solutions for temperature measurement to LA-CO and helped to create new growth opportunities in the industrial and welding channels.
Walbuck and J.P. Nissen joined the LA-CO Industries family in 2015 and 2017 respectively. The acquisition of these companies helped expand the Markal line of hand-held industrial marking products to include a wide variety of chalk and paint markers.
Over the past 85 years LA-CO Industries has expanded to 4,000 distributors in North America and has products sold in more than 60 countries. Entering its fourth-generation of family ownership, LA-CO continues to carry on Dr. Aronberg's vision to be the preferred choice for marking, temperature indication, identification, and chemical products.
