American-Made Longevity, Brand Durability & E-Commerce Adaptation with Patrick Johnston

Sure. My name is Patrick Johnston, and I’m the Vice President of Sales for Dutton-Lainson Company here in Hastings, Nebraska. I’ve been with Dutton-Lainson for going on 16 years now, and I’ve been through a lot of changes with the company, but I’m happy to be here talking with you.

Dutton-Lainson has a pretty interesting American story. Our company started in 1886, right around the time of the westward expansion and the pioneers heading west. We’ve always been located here in Hastings, Nebraska, and at one point we were the largest horse collar manufacturer in the United States, so we really helped fuel a lot of that pioneer expansion.

Coming through the years, with this being our 140th year in business, the company has morphed a lot and done some really wild things, including wartime manufacturing for both World War I and World War II for the US government and the military, which earned us some honors and recognition during that time. It’s an interesting case study in adapting and staying diversified as a company, and in making it across the span of three centuries.
We’re still family-owned today, a fifth-generation family-owned and privately held company, which as you probably know is really rare these days. We currently own and operate six different business divisions, and I’m primarily involved in our OEM trailer parts division, where we’re mostly known for manufacturing OEM trailer components.

Being as old and, shall we say, sometimes archaic a company as we are, over the last few decades we’ve worked hard to keep our viability. As different things have come along, I think we were one of the first, or at least an early adopter, of US manufacturers who pivoted to creating content on YouTube. We have a very in-depth YouTube channel that covers the specifics of our products and brands, how-to videos, and things like that. A lot of the people who follow us in the industry and patronize our products would tell you those YouTube videos we started a long time ago have been an important anchor.

We were also an early adopter of selling on Amazon. We were approached many years back about developing a direct vendor relationship with Amazon, and now, almost 20 years into that process, we have a good legacy vendor relationship and we’re selling more direct to consumer on Amazon than ever before in the company’s history, continuing to grow sales year over year, which is really challenging and complicated.
The final piece is that we have our own direct-to-consumer web property and conduct our own e-commerce. We have to be a little delicate about that, because we have a really important and valuable network of dealers, distributors, and resellers who sell our products. We have to walk that line carefully so we’re not taking from the core customers of our other customer base, our dealers and distributors.

Most people traditionally come into contact with a Dutton-Lainson product through a new marine trailer. If you buy a boat, it usually comes on a trailer to make it towable, and right now about 80 to 85% of the marine trailers made in the US have a Dutton-Lainson component on them. Dutton-Lainson is currently the only domestic manufacturer left of the three primary product categories we deal in, which are winches, jacks, and couplers. There’s a reason others don’t exist selling them in the US: it’s really hard to do what we do, and most of that business has gone overseas.

So that’s usually how people first get exposed to one of our products, on a trailer. The other dynamic is that if you’re replacing equipment on a trailer, and maybe not even a marine trailer, and you begin searching online for the highest-quality winch, jack, or coupler components, it doesn’t take long to run into the Dutton-Lainson brand as the only American-made version of these products left in the market.

I think so. Our brand has been around for such a long time, and whether it’s OEMs or direct consumers, people have been exposed to our products. I spoke with an 80-year-old gentleman on the phone the other day who said, “I’ve been buying your products for 40 years, and the reason I keep buying them is that when I need something, you guys are there on the phone to answer my call, so I want to keep spending my money with you.” That’s a little microcosm of what has happened for our company over a long period of time. We’ve built great customer loyalty with our OEMs and big customers, and with direct consumers too.

For the younger generations who are now asking, “How can I put a high-quality winch on my trailer?” and running that search online, we feel we’ve done a good job of putting our information out there so they have a high probability of bumping into the original American-made version of our products.

That’s a really interesting question. We’ve been analyzing our backend web traffic metrics recently. As I said, our direct web property is an important part of our business, and as Google and some of the big companies online have changed their algorithms recently, we’ve seen some strong variances in web traffic and in how people are flowing in. What we’re finding in the industry is that we’ve reached a pivot point where AI is trying to go out, find information, and analyze our company and the data we put out there. So we’re realizing we have to pivot our approach and write our web content so that AI picks it up appropriately and displays it properly to our customer base.

Like a lot of people, we’ve started having some of those goofy conversations with consumers who say, “I found this information online through AI,” and it’s completely incorrect, whether that’s the rated capacity of a winch for a boat trailer or something else. We try to explain that the information they found is inaccurate, and because we’re the manufacturer, we can give them the accurate information. But then we’re left with the question of why the accurate information isn’t being found and properly displayed by AI. So for us, making sure over the next year or two that we’ve built our web presence properly for analysis by AI is a big challenge, and probably one a lot of other people are going through too.

Yes. Because we make mechanical, technological items that carry real liability and danger if they’re operated improperly or matched to the wrong equipment, we and our engineering staff work hard to make sure we have proper consumer-facing information and that we’re equipping and educating people on how to use our products, and products like them, safely. So you’re exactly right: some of the Reddit threads and sub-discussions where consumers say whatever they want, often with incorrect information, are inherently dangerous. The question is how we can combat that a little and make sure we’re putting a strong, useful, company-forward approach out there.

There is. We definitely feel like we’re standing on a bridge generationally. We still deal with a huge number of customers I’d call the older generation, people age 60 and above, who were used to doing things before the internet. They still want to call and have a direct conversation with the company, and we have very heavy patronage and loyalty from that older base, some of whom have used our products for 40 or 50 years and have an almost nostalgic link to buying Dutton-Lainson or Goldenrod products.

The challenge is with the newer generations, say 40 and below, who grew up consuming product using only the internet as a resource. We have to properly position our brand in front of that consumer too, and we’re finding you have to spend money to do it, whether through advertising campaigns, Google Ads, or supplementing our Amazon marketing spend. That way they’re not just finding the cheapest, junkiest winch on Amazon that they can buy for $29 and that falls apart on the first use, but instead finding our higher-quality option and understanding why a DL product is what it is, and why they’ll be better off long-term spending a little more for a part they can use for the next 15 to 20 years. It’s a tough marketing dynamic to sell younger consumers on that idea.

With the internet at all of our fingertips all the time, one of the things that has always been core in my mind working for this company is the unique selling proposition. What is it that you’re bringing to the market that you’re doing better or more dynamically than somebody else? There’s so much clutter in the market today, a lot of “me too” coming along with whatever the marketing idea or trend is. You sometimes get a quick flash-in-the-pan success from riding a trend that’s been around for six months, but what are you going to do to build long-term staying power, something that brings success not just in six months or six years, but for the next 50 to 60 years, something generational?

One of the things I appreciate about this company is that the owners and founders have that long-term view of building something durable over a long period of time, and diversity has always been important to that. It definitely isn’t the norm. Like I said, we’re the last of our peers. There were many other domestic competitors that did what we did 30, 40, 50 years ago, and they’re all gone now, largely for chasing modern trends. So don’t get too focused on the short-term trend. Ask what you’re going to do as a unique selling proposition that has durability over time. That’s the big thought I’d share.

Absolutely, happy to help. Good luck to you and your team moving forward.

Thanks, Stephen.