Wright Manufacturing featured its full product line at the recent GIE+EXPO in Louisville. Hal White, vice president of sales and marketing at Wright, observed that the outlook was upbeat among dealers and lawn maintenance businesses attending the show. “The people I spoke with were very positive about business growth for the 2013 season,” White said. “For the past few years landscapers, have been focused on maintaining their fleet, but now they’re ready to purchase new equipment.”
White noted that while the full range of Wright products at GIE+EXPO drew significant interest, a few models in particular attracted heavy traffic. “Everyone knows that we were the first to build stand-on mowers, but even our non-stander models got a lot of attention, including our Sport X and the new Wright ZTO model,” White said. “Many people who looked at the ZTO remarked that it was very well-built, especially for its price point. And I heard similar comments from visitors about our other mowers.”
GIE+EXPO’s about learning equipment, inside and out. While many attendees came to GIE+EXPO primarily to see and test-drive the latest in lawn and landscape technology, some came for additional reasons. Jesse James Middleton, owner of Bluewater Bay Lawn Care in Niceville, Florida, saw the show as an opportunity to not only check out new products but to speak directly to Wright representatives and convey what he liked about the mowers, as well as get assurances that his equipment would continue to be supported. Middleton said, “I wanted to ensure that we had the ongoing support from Wright that we need for our fleet. We’re going exclusive with Wright mowers in the coming year and we wanted to protect what we have now as well as what we’ll have in the future.
“We believe that the simpler something is, the better it is,” Middleton added. “And we see Wright sharing this viewpoint with us. In addition to being simple, well-built and maneuverable, their mowers are engineered to have parts that are interchangeable between models. This allows things like blades to be changed on the job quickly, and enables the mowers to be maintained easily and to run longer. I’ve documented a 27% increase in the productivity of my lawn care business since I began using Wright commercial mowers.”
