About Us

We’ve always been a family business since our inception. We started out 35 years back, when my father got into the door business for the greater Cleveland area. Based in Elyria (which for those of you not familiar with the town is a small, western suburb of Cleveland), he covered a lot of ground, both physically and technically. Anything from doors in downtown Cleveland, to garage doors in suburbia, to big train doors was (and still is) fair game.

Myself, I got going in my father’s business twenty years ago. We did pretty well for ourselves, and I continued my dad’s handiwork once he decided on retiring. But when you’re an industrial company in a place like the Cleveland area, there’s no rest for the weary. When the housing market crashed in the mid 00’s, and with businesses and people steadily trickling out of Cleveland to further afield, we held a family conference and realized that we needed to expand our entrepreneurial horizons a little bit further than the Lake Erie region.

That’s when we started doing business online and selling our goods and services on eBay. We started – quite literally – with a single drawer of equipment slated for online sales. That was a few scarce years ago. Almost immediately business increased, and we decided to go “all in,” disregard eBay pretty much entirely, and design our own website for ourselves.

We haven’t regretted our decision once. So many mom-and-pop machine shops and warehouses across America are shutting their doors these days, but our own door biz has steadily expanded its sales by 20% a month since setting up online. This year alone we doubled last year’s sales. We’ve been able to do it not only because we went digital, but because of our 35 year-long prowess in our field, and our Midwestern work ethic.

Point of fact, North Shore Door of Elyria, OH isn’t shutting its gates anytime soon. In fact, we actually kind of see ourselves as part of a “new model” for how manufacturing can recover in places like Cleveland. We think there’s a lesson to be learned and an opportunity to be presented in telling you our story, how we went from a single drawer of sales-goods to buying (recently) an 80,000 square foot building to house our new operations. We’re one of a growing number of industrial businesses that provide a shiny, new spear-tip to the old “Rust Belt”. Family business that we may be, even so, we’re “opening the door” for others to realize that this great city and this great region are going to climb back on their feet faster than some folks would have you believe.