About Us

In the early 1970’s an increase in foreign imports began to take a toll on the US manufacturing sector.  The reaction of businesses relied primarily on the assumption that the success of imported products was price related, and responded to the competition with strategies aimed at reducing production costs. These strategies resulted in the reduction of product quality as well as product cost. By the early 1980’s after a decade of cost reduction the quality of American products had fallen so dramatically that it attracted the attention of the national media and became a regular topic on the nightly news.

With intent to reverse the slide of product quality for the compressed air industry Great Lakes Air was founded in 1983. The company employed a philosophy of Total Quality Management (TQM) that focused on customer wants and needs in the design of products as well as the long term reliability of those products. To affirm our commitment to TQM Great Lakes launched a warranty unique to the compressed air industry that covered an entire refrigerated air dryer for 5-Years. At that time historically a 1-year warranty was considered a long term warranty. That original 5-Year product warranty is still supported today by many of our product lines as part of our ongoing commitment to total quality management and the industry’s most reliable products.