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A Lot Can Happen in 80 Years

This year, Mailender celebrates 80 years as a world-class distributor, and while plenty has changed since our inception in 1936 (we no longer specialize in dairy equipment, for example), a lot has remained the same. Our devotion to customer relationships has been a driving force in our company since in the very beginning and remains a central tenant of our company values today.

It took guts for Kartan Mailender to start Mailender-Barnett in 1936. The Great Depression was in full swing and no one felt particularly confident about the economy or the future. But he saw a need that was going unfilled, and decided to take a chance.

The first focus of the Mailender-Barnett Company was to distribute dairy supplies and equipment to farmers in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. A natural connection was made in 1940 when Mailender-Barnett started working with another iconic Cincinnati company, Lindner Brothers Ice Cream, now United Dairy Farmers (UDF), a company we still work with today.

During the 1960’s, when the desire for convenience was gaining momentum, Mailender-Barnett expanded into paper products and food service disposables. Before the decade was out, and when the popularity of convenience stores was growing exponentially, we were expanding our offerings again with a move to incorporate food service disposables.

In order to accommodate all the new growth, the late 1960’s saw our big move from downtown Cincinnati to a much larger facility in the suburbs. All the new space was quickly put to good use when in the 1970’s Mailender again expanded offerings to include janitorial supplies and equipment. By 1981, we were a select distributor for Scott Paper Company. Around that same time distribution again takes on new products with the adoption of industrial packaging materials and equipment.

By 2001 we had outgrown our facility again and moved to a state-of-the-art distribution center in West Chester Township, Ohio. The new facility triples our square footage and adequately allows for continued growth.

In 2006 we trimmed the “Barnett” from our name to reveal a more streamlined, Mailender, Inc. and two years later, aquire Midjasco, a Spartan Chemical distributor. This signals our expansion into chemicals and janitorial supplies.

The most recent decade has seen even more growth and company acquisitions, a trend we expect to continue long into the future. But no matter how big we get or how far we expand our distribution operations, we’ll always have the needs of our customers at the heart of what we do.