Heavy Snow Is Windfall for a Shovel Factory
When the snow piles up on America’s sidewalks and driveways, the Rugg family smiles. And this winter they’ve been smiling a lot.
Five generations of Ruggs dug themselves a niche in the snow-shovel business, and along the way, their 12-person company in the snowy Connecticut River Valley has changed the way a nation clears its front steps.
Not even the snow blower or the super plow has made a dent in the demand for the products from Rugg Manufacturing Co., one of the nation’s oldest snow-shovel makers.
“Whatever else you use, you are still going to need a shovel,” said company President Steve Peck, whose wife, Betsy, serves as the chief financial officer. She is the latest Rugg in the family business.
The industry is dominated by a few large firms, including Union Tools, said John D. McGreevey, executive director of the Lawn and Garden Marketing Assn.
“But there are opportunities in the upscale market for smaller manufacturers to establish a niche,” he said.
And that’s what Rugg has done.
In the late 1970s, it developed the first Teflon-coated aluminum blade shovel and now its 19 models feature blades of various “space-age” plastics.
Its latest innovation is the Shocksaver. The shovel’s handle contains a rigid spring that absorbs the shock when its user hits a curb or the edge of the patio.
Rugg experimented with various kinds and shapes of plastic for the scoop until it came up with one that was rigid enough to stand up to winter. It froze the blades for 24 hours, then whacked them and banged them.
And then came the ultimate test: A pickup truck was backed up over the blade. Only when it survived that punishment did the Shocksaver go on the market.
The evolution of the snow shovel--as shown in old catalogs and by the scoops and pushers hanging on the wall of the company’s 19th century mill--is one of a never-ending struggle by man to find any way to ease a hard, cold job.
“You just have to keep experimenting and trying things until you come up with something that works,” said shop superintendent John McAndrews, a 25-year employee whose father, grandfather and great-uncle worked in the plant.
“We’ve been making this steel snow pusher for 30 to 40 years,” he said while watching a line of robins-egg-blue blades come out of the painting room. “And the Long Island Railroad has been buying them for just about as long.”
In recent years, the company has been best-known for its trademark Backsaver models, with a bent handle to ease the strain, and its use of plastics.
“My father-in-law came up with that in 1967 and we’ve been making them ever since,” Peck said. “But they’ve really caught on in the past decade, with all the attention that is being paid to ergonomics.”
Amos Rugg started out making wooden hay rakes in 1842, a product the company still produces along with other lawn and garden rakes. To fill the slow winter months, he added snow shovels in 1879, when ready-made snow shovels were still a novelty.
The company’s first snow shovels were of tough but resilient white ash formed into a scoop. And one of its first innovations was a metal strip on the wearing edge, followed by steel blades with a curve varied for either pushing snow away or scooping it up.
By the turn of the century, both Rugg and its oldest competitor, Ames True-Temper, which started out making shovels in North Easton, Mass., in the 1770s, were turning out steel snow shovels, said Greg Galer, curator of the Stonehill Industrial History Center at Stonehill College in Easton, which has a few early Rugg models in its collection.
Rugg stayed small, but Ames, part of the U.S. Industries conglomerate, is now the largest hand-tool maker in the world, he said.
Snow shovels are still one of the most seasonal of manufacturing businesses, but that gives a small domestic company that works quickly an edge over overseas manufacturers that require six weeks to deliver their product.
Rugg typically makes about 150,000 shovels a season. But Peck said this January alone it turned out 75,000 to meet the demand created by heavier-than-normal snowfall.
On the Net:
https://www.rugg.com
