NEPA @ Work
Trion Industries
5/28/2026 | 5m 1sVideo has Closed Captions
Inside the factory making 100 million retail hooks every year.
Go inside Trion Industries in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where retail display hooks and shelf systems used by major stores like Walmart and Target are manufactured. This episode of NEPA @ Work explores the hidden industry behind modern retail merchandising and the family-owned company producing millions of products each year.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
NEPA @ Work is a local public television program presented by WVIA
NEPA @ Work
Trion Industries
5/28/2026 | 5m 1sVideo has Closed Captions
Go inside Trion Industries in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where retail display hooks and shelf systems used by major stores like Walmart and Target are manufactured. This episode of NEPA @ Work explores the hidden industry behind modern retail merchandising and the family-owned company producing millions of products each year.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipWe make about 100 million hooks a year.
Everything in a grocery store that isn't for sale, that holds all the things for sale, we probably made here.
I mean, you go in a store, you see them, you don't even think about them.
We make the wire form, we weld the back plate, so we make this lock, and then we make the extrusion that holds your label.
All the Feats hooks are made here, all the Wall Wall hooks are made here.
Walmart is one of our biggest, if not the biggest right now.
You know, when you're going through Walmart, and you're picking that off of that hook, Tryon made that, so we made that right up the street.
Bass Pro Shops, from Claire's Jewelry, and so we get from all over the world.
Bonus points if you can guess where this is from, Target Rad.
And now when I go into stores, I'm looking at every hook, every tray.
Hooks are really our main business, we make 100 million hooks a year, so a lot, a lot of hooks.
But then, the plastic extrusion, so that's a big part of our business.
And then, this is sort of our third type of product.
So this is a pusher system, a spring, so as you put product in, it'll keep your product facing.
So, as someone pulls it out, they're not going to have candy sitting in the back, that's not going to be shoppable.
They're going to have, their shelves are going to look full and flush.
So we're a third generation company, my grandfather started it.
He invented the world's first straight entry pegboard hook.
He was tired of lifting up shelves to have to replace the hooks, so he invented a swivel backplate.
And so, he came up with a patent and started making it.
Woolworths was a big store back then and they became a big customer and it spiraled and it became a bigger and bigger company.
This is one of the variations of the original hook from the original owner.
Instead of moving shelves around, he invented a swivel backplate on it.
So instead of moving the shelf off the top, you could just rotate the backplate, put the prongs into the hole, and that's it.
We have about 200 patents now and about 130,000 SKUs.
So, from one hook, we have literally hundreds of thousands of different hooks.
Oh yeah, that big blue building on the highway, what do you guys do there?
We start from scratch, we get wire in on spools and it'll go through a machine, form the wire in different lengths, different shapes, sizes, depending what you need.
And then your machine is going to put all of these bends in, so it'll bend this, here, here, and then separately it'll bring in wire, it'll weld this part on.
Then it may have to go to a spot welder to get a different backplate or tip welded on it where you would hold the price tag.
Then we show them the powder coater, how it runs through, cleans it, sprays the powder on and heats it and finishes the hook off.
So this is probably made, like, this hook minus this plastic part is going to be made on one machine just in one run.
And the machine making this probably makes 4 ,000 of these an hour.
I mean, between mechanics and welders and material handlers, setup people, it takes a village to make a hook.
Northeast Pennsylvania, the work my grandfather did, he always said, it's your responsibility to take care of the place you live.
Whether that means supporting it financially, supporting the non-profits, just making where you live.
If you live somewhere, you better make it as good of a place as you want it to be because it's up to you.
We're not private equity, we are family owned business, so his ethos of making the community as good of an area as you can, we try to live by that.
We have a food drive happening right now since SNAP benefits are ending.
In two weeks, we have our pie in the face day, which will mostly be people throwing pies in my face all day long.
So we'll have basket raffles and lottery tickets and scratch offs and gifts and, you know, Adam goes in the dunk tank.
He's willing to take a pie in the face.
I always say it's not just our family because if you talk to people who work here, a lot of them, their parents worked here.
Their grandparents worked here.
Their kids worked here.
I've worked here for not quite 38 years right now.
I started as a welder mechanic on spot welders and I moved up through the ranks through the course of the years.
Started there was roughly 40 people here.
Now there's roughly a little over 250 people here.
It's more of a family than it is a workplace.
It's easy to come to work when you know the people, you know they have a dog, you know that they have a cat.
Like, you know, the kids, the kids have grown.
They used to come in for Halloween and now they've graduated high school.
That's why we're here so long, a lot of us.
Like I said, they're like family to me.

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NEPA @ Work is a local public television program presented by WVIA