FORGE Partner Spotlight – Bossard
Getting Connected with Bossard
When you’re prototyping, your workshop can start looking like the bench in your granddad’s garage—cluttered with bins of nuts, bolts, and washers in every imaginable shape and size. Beware! The wrong fastener choices during product development cause headaches and delays when you scale. A rivet that seems perfect now might be impossible to find in bulk. When startups need help sourcing the right solution for connecting components, Bossard Group has the inventory and the know-how. They carry everything from clips and bonding fasteners to welding materials and fluid management components.
“Fasteners are usually the last thing that innovators and inventors think about but they can shut production down if they aren’t on the shelf when it comes time to build,” Brian DeNardo, a market manager at Bossard, said. “The Bossard customer support team is here and ready to support startups and innovators today and tomorrow as they move from prototype to production.”
Bossard serves local clients out of its Stoughton, MA facility, but its origins lie in a Swiss lake town. In 1831, a man named Franz Kaspar Bossard-Kolin founded a small hardware store in Zug, Switzerland. In the 1940s, demand for increasing numbers of more sophisticated fasteners spurred Bossard to expand. Now they employ 2,700 people in 32 countries. DeNardo attributes the company’s ongoing success to its consistency and customer service. “The biggest factor in our growth is the partnerships we develop with our customers.”
Bossard distributes fasteners for electrical and mechanical engineering applications, managing companies’ fastener inventory with IoT tools and consulting with them to simplify their fastener bill of materials (BOM). Bossard has sold more than a million different types of fasteners in their nearly 200-year history, which gives them some serious technical expertise. FORGE connects its members with them for advice about designing for simpler BOMs and selecting fasteners they can buy in large volumes as their sales grow.
“Our partnership with FORGE goes hand in hand with Bossard’s values and guiding principles. We believe in being active in the community in which we operate and to use our expertise to help those who may not have as much knowledge of fasteners,” DeNardo said.
FORGE members come to Bossard when they’ve hit an obstacle during the design phase and when they’re getting ready to mass produce. Bossard likes to connect with startups early in their design process to help them optimize their BOM and lower costs for the growth to come. They’re happy to help startups get it together during any phase of R&D or production.
Looking to the future, DeNardo said “I am most excited about the innovative products coming out of our region and the opportunities and organizations Bossard gets to work with. I’ve been lucky to see some really cool products through FORGE that will soon be in the market and making an impact.”
