Evolution Motion Solutions: erasing a century of brand names

Part of Distributor Playbooks — strategy teardowns of every company on the 2025 MDM Top Distributors lists.

Evolution Motion Solutions lands at No. 47 on the 2025 MDM Top Industrial Distributors list and No. 12 in Fluid Power, Modern Distribution Management's annual ranking of North America's largest distributors. The name has existed only since November 2024. The businesses behind it go back to 1953. That gap is the whole story: a private equity owner took two respected regional hydraulics distributors, stitched in four smaller specialists, and then did something most acquirers are afraid to do. It threw away every legacy name.

From two shops to one platform

Womack Machine Supply started in Farmers Branch, Texas in 1953, building one of the deepest fluid-power inventories in the Southwest and layering on engineering, repair, and training services over seven decades. Morrell Group formed in 1976 out of Auburn Hills, Michigan, growing into its own regional player in industrial automation and motion control. Both were well-regarded, both were mid-sized, and neither was a top-10 name nationally.

Denver-based Platte River Equity had already acquired Womack before it went looking for a partner to scale it. On June 7, 2023, Morrell Group joined the Womack platform. The combined company covered 27 states from 14 facilities, Morrell's 7 in the Midwest plus Ontario, and Womack's 13 across Texas and the Southwest, with a workforce over 400. Womack's president Matt Oldroyd and Morrell's Mark Majewski and Mark Garrett framed it as complementary geography and shared culture rather than a cost-out roll-up, and the fact that both legacy leadership teams stayed on to run the combined company backs that up.

Then came the acquisitions that don't make headlines but round out a fluid-power platform: Stegner Controls and Stegner Aerospace (precision motion and aerospace-grade controls), LOR Mobile Controls (radio remote controls for mobile and off-highway equipment), and Morrell Industrial. By late 2024 the platform had grown to 20 locations across 31 states and one Canadian province.

The insight: retiring 100 years of brand equity was the strategy, not a formality

Most industrial distribution roll-ups keep the acquired names alive for years, sometimes forever, because a 70-year-old regional brand carries real trust with plant managers and maintenance engineers who've bought from "Womack" or "Morrell" their whole careers. Evolution Motion Solutions did the opposite. In November 2024 it announced that Womack, Morrell, and every other subsidiary name would be retired, replaced entirely by one brand across all 20 locations.

That is a deliberate bet, and it cuts both ways. The upside: a single name, one sales motion, and one identity to sell to national accounts that don't want to manage six regional vendor relationships under one ownership umbrella. Fluid power and industrial automation are fragmenting into fewer, larger platforms, and a unified brand signals "we are that platform" more convincingly than a holding-company logo with six sub-brands underneath it. The downside: you're asking a maintenance buyer in Farmers Branch who has ordered from Womack for 30 years to trust a name that didn't exist two years ago, at the exact moment competitors like SunSource and Applied Industrial keep decades of brand recognition intact even as they roll up their own peers. CEO Matt Oldroyd's own words, that the name needed to represent "who we need to be, who we will be in the future," read less like marketing copy and more like an admission that the old names couldn't carry where the platform was headed next.

What the MDM numbers actually say

The company's climb on MDM's lists has been steady, not explosive. Womack alone ranked No. 55 in Industrial Supply and No. 13 in Fluid Power on the 2023 list, before the Morrell merger had fully shown up in the data. Two years and several bolt-on acquisitions later, the combined company sits at No. 47 and No. 12. That's real progress, but it's single-digit-rank movement, not the kind of leap that headline M&A activity might suggest. Revenue for 2024 wasn't disclosed in MDM's report, which is typical for a still-private, PE-owned platform that hasn't needed public disclosure.

The parent company's playbook, visible from the outside

Platte River Equity isn't experimenting on Evolution Motion Solutions. The firm runs the same platform-consolidation model across Belt Power, Tipco Technologies, Building Controls & Solutions, and MES Life Safety, and it recently closed its 100th acquisition across the portfolio. Evolution Motion Solutions is one instance of a formula: acquire a strong regional distributor, add adjacent specialists, unify the brand, and let a national engineering and sales bench compete for accounts that outgrew any single regional player. Whether a maintenance buyer notices the name on the truck matters less to this model than whether the platform can show up in 31 states with the same technical depth everywhere. For a channel built on inventory, catalogs, and the trust of the person who answers the phone when a hydraulic pump fails at 2 a.m., that's a genuinely different bet on what the brand is even for.

Distribution rewards whoever gets the boring infrastructure right: the branch network, the parts catalog, the data behind both. Evolution Motion Solutions is betting that a single unified name, backed by a private equity buy-and-build engine, gets that infrastructure right faster than two century-old names ever could separately.