Our History

45 Years of Growth Through Customer Service

The Fastenal story began in November 1967 when company founder Bob Kierlin opened the very first Fastenal store in his hometown of Winona, MN. The front counter was a salvaged door, about a dozen people attended the "grand opening" weekend, and the first month's sales totaled $157. Despite this inauspicious beginning, Kierlin believed that Fastenal would ultimately succeed by providing the kind of service that keeps customers coming back. He later drilled his vision down to four simple words: "Growth Through Customer Service."

We've been guided by that motto ever since. Through the years, Fastenal personnel have made extraordinary acts of customer service routine, steadily earning our reputation as a reliable, "can do" supplier. Some of the stories have become company lore: the store manager who hopped on his snowmobile to deliver product in a blizzard; the time we reverse-engineered a part overnight to keep an automaker's assembly line running. Others blur together with repetition: coming in on weekends to help customers out, pulling all-nighters to fulfill emergency orders, driving for hours to track down and deliver desperately needed products.  Virtually every Fastenal store employee has stories like these to share, and they'll log many more before they hang up their blue work shirts.

These remarkable individual efforts have been backed by a company-wide commitment to innovate new and better ways to service our customers. We built America's largest industrial supply store network to provide local people and immediate product availability. We created an in-house manufacturing division to quickly make the unavailable part available. We became the leading force in VMI and industrial vending to help our customers operate more efficiently.  And we continue to invest aggressively in our sourcing and distribution operations in our never-ending effort to put more products closer to more of the customers who need them than any other industrial and construction supplies distributor.

A lot has changed within our company over the past 45 years. The old store with the wooden door for a front counter has given rise to more than 2,600 stores with locally tailored inventories and modern merchandising. Our original delivery vehicle (a badly dented '59 Coupe de Ville) has been superseded by a fleet of 5,000+ delivery vehicles, including hundreds of big trucks, as well as our trademark white pickups. But one all-important thing hasn't changed, and that's our commitment to provide the kind of service that keeps customers coming back – something that's still best summed up with four simple words:

"Growth Through Customer Service"