Expanded Safety Products Catalog

March 27, 2008
MSC launched its largest Safety Products Catalog in company history.  The new Safety Products Catalog has a total of 40,000 products representing a 50% increase in product SKU's since the company's 2005 catalog.  The new catalog will also be sent to a customer base over 5 times larger than the customer base that received the 2005 catalog.When asked what accounted for the tremendous success and growth of MSC’s Safety Catalog, Erik Gershwind, MSC's Senior Vice President of Product Management & Marketing, stated, "We believe there are two key factors that account for the growth in our safety business.  First, we worked closely with our customers to develop the exact type of product mix and safety resource they wanted and second, our strategic supplier relationships allow MSC to provide cutting edge, industry leading safety products to our customers.  As with all of MSC Industrial Direct Co., Inc.’s business segments, we spend a great deal of time using customer research and frequent face-to-face customer discussions to understand exactly what our customers would view as the ideal safety product resource.  We're able to then take this feedback and utilize our close strategic supplier relationships to quickly assemble industry leading and cutting edge products in the safety product categories our customers have told us are most important.  Customer focus and premium quality, innovative products, I believe, have been the key to the growth of our safety products business and catalog."When asked what makes MSC Industrial Direct Co., Inc.’s safety business and catalog different from others in the industry, Anthony Testa, Business Manager, MRO Product Management, responded, "We have a couple of significant points of difference from the rest of the industry that we believe are major strengths for the MSC safety business.  First, our customers told us that four safety categories of primary interest to them are eyewear, hearing and hand protection products, and identification products.  In response to that interest, we assembled the largest product line breadth and depth in these categories of any full line safety products supplier.  MSC Industrial Direct Co., Inc. safety products customers also have full access to all of MSC's 550,000 catalog products and an additional 2.5 million database products.  That allows our customers to single source not only their safety products but all of their industrial supply and MRO products with the convenience of single ordering, invoicing, and shipping."