80 Years in Hopkins
In 1946, a father and his two sons walked into a building in Hopkins, Minnesota, and started a company.
Arthur Edwards Sr. brought his sons, Arthur Jr. and John, into a business idea that had been forming as the war ended. Art Jr. had just come home. The country was about to build more houses, faster than it ever had. The Edwards family wanted to make something those houses would need.
What they made first was asphalt siding. It was an affordable, durable product for the moment, and the moment was enormous. Returning veterans were starting families. The suburbs were being drawn on paper. Across the country, builders were putting up houses on land that had been farmland a year earlier, and every one of those houses needed an exterior.
EDCO built a manufacturing facility and got to work.
Following the Material
Asphalt siding did what it was supposed to do. But the Edwards family had built the company around a particular kind of restlessness, an unwillingness to stay with a product just because it was the product they made. So when aluminum became a viable siding material, EDCO retooled and started making aluminum.
Then steel siding came along, and steel turned out to be better. So EDCO moved to steel.
That sounds simple in a sentence. In practice, it meant walking away from production lines that worked, equipment that had been paid for, and a market position built on the old material. Each time, the company bet that the better product would justify the disruption. Each time, it did.
The pattern set something in place. EDCO became a company that paid attention to materials and was willing to act on what it learned.
Into Steel Roofing
In the late 1990s, Art Sr. saw something most of the industry hadn't yet. Steel had become the material of choice in EDCO's siding business for good reasons: longevity, weather resistance, the way it held a finish. Those same qualities, he believed, would matter even more on a roof.
EDCO entered the steel roofing market. The reception was immediate. Homeowners who had spent decades replacing asphalt shingles every fifteen or twenty years found a product that could outlast their mortgage. Contractors found a system they could install with confidence and stand behind.
By the time Art Sr. passed away in 2012, the company he had started with his sons in 1946 had grown into something he could not have envisioned that first year in Hopkins. The siding work was still there. The roofing business was thriving. The Edwards name was on products keeping the weather out of houses in every climate the country has.
Hopkins, Today
We're still in Hopkins, Minnesota. We employ more than 200 people, most of them within a short drive of the original facility. We're one of the oldest continuously operating domestic metal fabricators in the United States, and the largest manufacturer of pre-finished metal siding products in the country.
Our product line has grown into a full system. Siding, roofing, soffit, fascia, and gutters all come from the same place, designed to work together.
A few principles have not moved in 80 years. We still manufacture in the United States. Our products are still made primarily from steel, and nearly all of them are fully recyclable at the end of a service life that often spans generations. Our warranties still cover both the product and the labor to install it, which is uncommon in the industry and has been a deliberate choice since long before it was a competitive talking point.
The Edwards family started this company in 1946 because they wanted to make a lasting product at a fair price. Eighty years on, in the same town, with the same focus on steel and on craftsmanship, we're still doing the work the Edwards family came to Hopkins to do.
Here's to the next eighty.