Who Owns Zoro?

Zoro began in spring 2011 as Zoro Tools, a 20-person startup inside Grainger's Chicago headquarters. The concept borrowed directly from MonotaRO, the Japanese online distributor Grainger had taken a stake in two years earlier: take the endless-aisle e-commerce model proven in Japan and apply it to the US market, where no dominant online MRO seller existed.

The launch carried 180,000 products sourced largely from Grainger's existing assortment, with employees packing and shipping early orders themselves. The pitch was simple: transparent one-price-for-all listings, no sales rep, no quote process, and a much wider aisle than any catalog. By 2016 the assortment had grown past 1 million products.

Growth compounded through the late 2010s and into the 2020s. The name shortened to Zoro as the assortment spread beyond tools into safety, janitorial, office, and business supplies. Zoro expanded its supplier-direct and marketplace-style fulfillment, letting manufacturers drop-ship through the platform and pushing the catalog past 11 million unique products. The team grew to more than 600 people, and the business crossed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time.

A UK sibling launched in November 2017 with about 200,000 products, though Grainger's 2025 exit from the UK market ended that experiment. Back in the US, Zoro's momentum accelerated: it became the faster-growing half of Grainger's Endless Assortment segment, posting 25.2% daily sales growth in the third quarter of 2026 as existing customers bought more categories per order.