My dad Richard Batterton, Sr. founded TriStar Metals in 1986 in our family garage. He was a welder by trade, a true master craftsman and I was his student. He started out making custom stainless pieces for anybody who needed anything. Eventually our small family business started to grow and we moved our company to Boyd, a small farming community outside of Fort Worth, TX. We manufactured all kinds of stuff from architectural hand rails to stainless cabinetry for military hospitals and Airforce bases.
About ten years ago a local veterinarian walked into our office asking for a stainless steel wet/prep table. He had a wood laminate version that was falling apart and wanted something that would last, in a custom size and wasn’t able to find it on the market. He and I worked up a drawing and just a few weeks later he was thrilled with his custom creation. After his open house, the phones started to ring with other Vets who wanted customized pieces and now we are exclusively a manufacturer for the Animal Health Industry. We soon realized there was nothing else like our products available in the marketplace and TriStar Vet was born.
Although we’ve grown, we still pretty much do business the same way. Each day we have a production meeting to turn in new jobs and it’s amazing to watch the customers’ ideas go from inception to completion. We set up every job for final inspection before we ship it out to the customer and the salesperson responsible for the job goes over each detail meticulously to ensure it’s exactly as the customer wanted it. We set aside a special area in our plant specifically for inspections. It’s not cheap to do that final step, but we get calls from general contractors all the time who say “I can tell this stuff was set up already”. An added benefit is that we have to pull all the hardware and whatever else is needed so we rarely get those calls of “I’m missing this or that”.
In 2006 we started a division of the company that would cater to the growing grooming, boarding and animal sheltering industry. These customers have unique needs and requirements, so creating a new division to address them was a necessity. We believe we have a niche in this market and that is our ability to customize our existing products or help a customer create something new altogether. When building a new facility or updating an existing one, by using Direct Animal Kennel Products, you are going to be able to maximize your money and get truly custom equipment, something you are going to be happy with. We know it’s not just important to use quality materials, but quality construction is key to building equipment that will last. We call it “The Direct Difference”.
