History
Arbill has been committed to bringing employees home safely for the past sixty-five years. This singular focus on safety has enabled us to deliver tremendous value in protecting your employees and industrial environment from the inherent hazards of the workplace.
Robert Bickman—a pioneer in the safety industry—founded Arbill in 1945 to provide affordable hand protection to workers in the highly industrialized Northeast region. Seeking to deliver even more competitive prices and exceptional quality, Arbill began manufacturing of a full line of safety gloves overseas in the mid-seventies. Less than ten years later Barry Bickman, Robert's son, expanded the glove line to include a full array of safety Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)—offering a needed one-stop industrial safety supply source to Arbill's valued customers in the wake of OSHA's formation.
In the mid-nineties Arbill established its industry-leading Quality program and achieved ISO certification. Today, we maintain that certification and continue to emphasize quality and continuous improvement from the warehouse floor, to our overseas inspections, to our Sales & Operations (S&OP) System. The company's top operations leaders are also certified ISO auditors and trainers, which positively benefits you and your organization in their creation of Arbill's processes, including: customer service, manufacturing, product inspection and delivery, and account and inventory management.
In 2002 our own tried and tested TruLine® brand became a market force in all major PPE product categories, including eye protection,hand protection, head and face protection, hearing protection, and protective clothing as we added overseas manufacturing joint-venture partners, which currently number 18 partners in eight countries. In addition to distributing all the major safety brands, we manufacture a significant amount of the products we sell direct to the marketplace every day.
Julie Copeland, Barry's daughter, took Arbill's helm in 2005. One of Julie's first missions was to address the need of our customers for a full service strategic safety solution. She and her services team spent the next couple years building out an unrivaled Environmental Health & Safety Services offering. What began with our Rx Safety Eyewear Program and Compliance Training services in 2006 grew to include six Safety Programs and a complete portfolio of Consulting Services by 2009.
Today, Arbill is an award-winning national safety products and services provider, able to fulfill the needs, and surpass the expectations, of the most complex multi-location customers with up to tens of thousands of employees worldwide. We remain a privately held business, which means we answer only to our customers, not to shareholders, unlike many of our multi-divisional publicly held competitors. Because our only priority is the safety needs of our customers, we are more agile in both our decision-making and responsiveness. Most importantly, we have never lost sight of the fact that our customers trust us to keep their most valuable resources—their employees—safe. We consider this our privilege, and take it very seriously. We look forward to working with you to provide with an end-to-end safety solution that keeps your employees safer every day while providing the best service and cost savings for you.
