The standard reasons for having practices that allow us to claim our products as Made in the USA do apply to our decision to go this route. We are proud of the country we live in, and we want to support other 100% USA based companies like ourselves. When a customer purchases a chemical metering pump, sample cooler, or boiler blowdown equipment from us, they are helping support Aaron, Lori, Lori, Johnny, Ed, Gary and others at Madden, all living in Elkhart Indiana. Purchases support Madden and our families.
So yes, we choose to be Made in the USA to return the same favor and support the same values and families across the nation with our purchases.
The recession in 2009 affected our area which is Elkhart County, Indiana particularly hard, so choosing to make a Made in the USA product hit close to home for us. With northern Indiana’s economy heavily invested and reliant upon manufacturing and specifically the RV (recreational vehicle) industry, the recession took many jobs away. At the beginning of the summer of 2009 Elkhart, Indiana had one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation at 17.8% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Madden Pump made it through the recession in part due to our boiler blowdown heat recovery system sales growing while businesses were looking for ways to save money.
Boiler blowdown heat recovery systems are designed to save thousands and thousands of dollars for companies who use boilers. These systems reuse what would be otherwise lost or wasted BTU’s, heat, for boiler make up water.
While we were doing fine during the recession, we made sure to buy from as many local companies as we could. We saw first-hand how the recession was taking jobs from friends, family members, and neighbors. Supporting local business, to help keep those jobs became very important to us. And it still important even with a recovering economy.
Our boiler blowdown equipment and our chemical injection pumps are 100% assembled and all of the parts needed are manufactured or bought, in the United States of America. We are proud of this.
But there is more to producing a Made in the USA product than just Patriotism and helping American businesses and American workers. There is a strategic business decision being made as well. A decision based on making profit.
Our castings and other parts are bought in the U.S.A because maintaining a consistent, reachable distribution channel helps us maintain quality and responsive service. Which we believe turns into repeat purchases and recommendations from distributors and customers to purchase Madden products.
Being a small company, we naturally don’t have some of the luxuries our larger competitors have, like inventory space and money. We have to be selective with what we stock and what we order in. So when a distributor or customer calls in with an emergency order requiring a non-stock item, what is the best we could do if we had to order from overseas, or even across the country for that matter? Likely, our best offer would be to expedite shipping to a several day lead time, either passing along or taking some of the extreme cost to do so. All in an effort to send an emergency order in what most likely will end up taking a week.
But we don’t do this, we buy from local companies we trust, who will bend over backwards for us, just like we will for you.
Just the other day we had an inquiry come in for a project that was about to start in Texas where their pumps they were using stopped functioning. They were in a hazardous environment and needed an explosion proof motor for their new chemical metering pumps. Also, they wanted variable frequency drives to automatically control the pump’s output.
This came in on Monday, and they needed it by Wednesday. We called our local supplier of these special motors and controllers in Kalamazoo to see what the best we could do was.
They started hastily getting things together for us, while our purchasing manager continued getting things together at our plant for the order. Our sales manager kept the contractor up to date as the day went on and one of the guys in the shop pushed to get his work done early so that he could go up to pick up the motors and controllers for the customer to save a day on shipping.
None of this would be possible if we didn’t have loyal local suppliers willing to work just as hard for the customer as we are. If we had to call overseas to inquire about a motor, or even to a huge conglomerate company here in the United States, who knows if we would have been able to get this around or not. Our local suppliers are just as much a part of our Madden team as the rest of us at our Elkhart plant.
Conclusion
That’s the reason we have and always will choose to produce Made in the USA products. When you buy Madden metering pumps, boiler blowdown equipment, chemical feed systems, sample coolers, and/or any of our other products, we want two things to stand out above all else:
And
2. Customer Service