Graybar Electric Company, Inc.

What is Graybar?
Graybar Electric Company is a privately held, employee-owned wholesale distributor of electrical, communications, data networking, and industrial products, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri.

Is Graybar publicly traded?
No. Graybar is 100% employee-owned through an ESOP established in 1929 and has no public stock listing.

Who founded Graybar?
Telegraph inventor Elisha Gray and partner Enos Barton founded the company in 1869 in Cleveland, Ohio, as Gray & Barton.

Who runs Graybar?
Kathleen Mazzarella has served as chairman and CEO since 2013.

How many locations does Graybar have?
More than 350 distribution centers and branches across North America.

Elisha Gray and Enos Barton founded Gray & Barton in 1869 in Cleveland, Ohio, a year after Gray's partner investment gave him the capital to scale his telegraph invention business. The company moved to Chicago in 1872 and, as the telegraph and then the telephone networks expanded, became the manufacturing and supply arm of what became Western Electric.

When AT&T consolidated Western Electric's supply operations, the company regained independence in 1925, reorganizing as Graybar Electric Company. Employee stock ownership began in 1929, making it one of the earliest and largest employee-owned enterprises in American business, a structure it has maintained for nearly a century.

The company moved its headquarters to St. Louis in 1982, where it remains. Through the 20th century it grew from a regional electrical supplier into a national network, adding communications and data products in the 1980s-90s as networked buildings became the norm, and industrial automation products in the 2000s.

Graybar publishes annual sustainability reporting covering fleet efficiency, building energy, supplier diversity, and its ESOP governance. The employee-ownership model is itself a differentiator: worker-owners share directly in the value they create, a structural answer to income inequality critiques of distributor economics.

The company holds multiple supplier certifications and participates in industry initiatives for responsible sourcing, human rights, and environmental compliance across its North American footprint.

As a private company, Graybar faces less public scrutiny than listed peers. Its operational challenges are the standard distribution-sector ones: supply chain disruptions, copper and commodity price volatility, and labor retention in a competitive warehouse and driver market.

The ESOP structure has been cited positively in academic and government studies of employee ownership as a model for retirement security and worker engagement.