LGG Industrial: A Hose Distributor Reclaims Its Own Name

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

LGG Industrial lands at No. 44 on Industrial Supply and No. 5 in Hose and Hose Accessories on Modern Distribution Management's 2025 Top Distributors list, the annual scorecard of North America's largest distributors across 20 verticals. The name is new. The company is not. Most of the industry still knows it by the name it wore for the better part of a decade: ERIKS North America.

A name that predates the interstate highway system

The lineage traces to 1935, when Gooding Rubber Company opened its doors. Over the next fifty years the business absorbed a long string of regional rubber and hose houses: Richmond Rubber in 1985, Haynes Inc. in 1986, F.B. Wright and Shields Rubber in 1991, then a run of names through the 1990s, Central Valley Rubber, Republic Rubber, Colonial Rubber, Interstate Rubber. In 2005 the combined company rebranded as Lewis-Goetz. A year later it bought Goodall, a Canadian and U.S. hose specialist with 21 locations north of the border and 12 south of it, and kept acquiring through 2015: Samson Industrial, RBH Mill & Elevator, EVCO, Valley Rubber & Gasket, Advanced Sealing, Action Industrial Group.

That is the same consolidation playbook most industrial hose and gasket distributors ran in that era: buy the town's rubber shop, keep the counter staff, fold in the routes. What makes LGG Industrial worth a closer look is what happened after the roll-up stopped rolling up.

Absorbed by a European conglomerate, then quietly divested

At some point after Jeff Crane's first run as CEO ended in 2015, the U.S. business became a subsidiary of ERIKS N.V., the Dutch industrial-services and MRO conglomerate, and took the name ERIKS North America. For years it operated as one region inside a much larger European parent, a common fate for successful American distributors that get folded into a global holding company's portfolio and effectively disappear from the trade press under their own name.

Then, at the end of March 2022, ERIKS North America separated from its Dutch parent. Fort Worth-based Luther King Capital Management purchased the business, and Jeff Crane came back as CEO that June, this time returning to a company he already knew from the inside. Between his two stints running the distributor, Crane had led TPC Wire and Cable, later rebranded Trexon, which gave him a manufacturer's-eye view of the same distributor relationships he'd spent a decade managing from the other side.

The unique insight: buying back your own name

Most distributors that get absorbed into a global conglomerate and later spun out by private equity emerge under some invented go-forward brand designed by a marketing agency. LGG Industrial did the opposite. In January 2024, instead of coining something new, the company renamed itself for its own two founding companies: Lewis-Goetz and Goodall. LGG is not an acronym anyone had to explain in a press release. It is initials the business already owned, going back to 2005 and 2006 respectively.

That is the strategic tell here. A company that spent roughly a decade as a line item inside a European industrial group deliberately reached backward past its own multinational ownership era to reclaim an identity its own people and customers already recognized, rather than manufacture a fresh one. MDM's coverage of the rebrand frames it as honoring "the legacy of its founding companies," which undersells how unusual that choice is. Post-carveout industrial distributors almost never do this. They usually want distance from their past, not proximity to it.

What independence bought them

Crane's own account of the transition, published on the company's site, describes a leadership rebuild alongside the ownership change: a new CFO, COO, HR leader, and a Key Industry Director role that didn't exist under ERIKS. The first acquisition as a standalone company came in January 2023, DeeTag, a fluid and material conveyance distributor with two Ontario locations and one in North Carolina, a modest deal but a signal that the M&A muscle atrophied under corporate ownership was being exercised again.

The moves since track a distributor investing in the plumbing of the business rather than the storefront. December 2024 brought a SugarCRM sales-automation rollout aimed at cutting time-to-revenue. A major renovation and expansion of the Rocky Mount, North Carolina facility wrapped in May 2026. Daniel Petschke was named CFO in July 2026. None of it is flashy. All of it reads like a company rebuilding commercial infrastructure that had gone soft during the years it was just a region on someone else's org chart.

Timeline

Four current product lines carry that history forward: material handling, sealing, fluid transfer, and fluid power hose, the last of which is where the 2025 MDM Hose and Hose Accessories ranking places the company at No. 5. The technical core, hydraulic hose assembly, gasket fabrication, conveyor belt splicing, is the kind of work that doesn't get disrupted by a change of ownership on a org chart in Amsterdam. It just waits for someone to reinvest in it.

Distribution success stories get told as founder myths or acquisition sprees. LGG Industrial's is a quieter kind: a business that survived being someone else's subsidiary for the better part of a decade and came out the other side choosing to be called exactly what it always was.