Bastian Solutions Brand Guidelines: A 1952 Indiana Caster Dealer Folded Into Toyota Automation

A distributor that taught itself automation.

Bastian Solutions traces its history to 1952 in Indianapolis, Indiana. When Toyota Industries announced its purchase of the company in February 2017, Modern Materials Handling described a business “with a history dating back to 1952,” and the company’s own press releases give the same founding year.

The business did not start under the Bastian name. In a 2015 interview with Modern Materials Handling, Bill Bastian Sr. said he joined the E.C. Stark Company in 1955, at 24, after leaving military service. Materials handling was not Stark’s main line, he said, but it distributed Colson casters. He bought the business in 1962 and renamed it the Bastian Stark Company.

He described an industry then made up mostly of fork trucks, pallets and push trucks, and a firm that moved early into conveyors. In about 1959, before he owned the company, he quoted a conveyor job for a Chrysler plant without having a conveyor line or an engineer of his own, found someone to price the job, and won it. Around the same time, he told the magazine, the firm became one of the early distributors for Hytrol, the conveyor maker, and “trained ourselves to become conveyor experts.”

The step from distributor to maker came from customer requests. “Customers would ask us to do things that weren’t in the catalog,” he said, so the company began designing special handling equipment, had local fabricators build it, and later began manufacturing for itself. Systems integration, in his account, grew out of the conveyor business. His son, also Bill, joined in the 1980s and pushed the company towards automation as computers and servo motors made it practical.

A June 2015 Modern Materials Handling report on the company’s celebration of Bill Bastian Sr.’s sixty years in the business quoted the mayor of Carmel, Indiana, saying the company had moved north to Carmel in 1989 with 22 employees and had about 180 local staff by 2015.

Integration, software and in-house products.

By the 2010s Bastian Solutions described itself as a materials handling systems integrator: in the words of its 2017 company profile, an innovator in materials handling automation, supply chain software, industrial controls and robotics, with clients and offices around the world. When Toyota bought it, the 2017 announcement listed 17 US offices and international offices in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Mexico and Spain.

Alongside integration, the company sold products of its own. A December 2018 company press release, reprinted by DC Velocity, said Bastian engineered and manufactured items including ZiPline Conveyor, ROGUE Composite Pallets, BlueHound IoT asset trackers and Exacta Supply Chain Software. The original caster trade was sold off: in February 2019 Modern Materials Handling reported that CasterDepot, a Michigan caster and wheel supplier, had acquired Bastian Solutions’ caster and wheel division, expanding into Indianapolis.

Trade-show work shows how an integrator presents itself. At ProMat 2025 in Chicago, Robotics 24/7 reported in April 2025, Bastian’s booths showed an integrated mini-system that combined an AutoStore grid, a Tompkins Robotics t-sort parcel sorter and a Sealed Air autobagger, alongside demonstrations of viastore’s ChannelCar pallet system and Exotec’s Skypod case-handling system.

Today the Bastian Automation website says that business now concentrates on custom automation for automotive, aerospace, tire and wheel, and heavy equipment manufacturing. It lists robotics integration, automated guided vehicles and autonomous mobile robots, automated storage and retrieval systems, conveyor and sortation systems and purpose-built machinery, together with maintenance and technical support, and gives its address in Greenfield, Indiana.

Who builds the automated warehouse.

Warehouse automation is an industry that mostly sells to other businesses, and its companies present themselves through the machines they install. The images are familiar across the sector: a dense block of stacked storage bins with robots running across the top, a swarm of small mobile robots moving under or up tall racks, or long shuttle aisles feeding a line of conveyors and sorters inside a distribution centre.

Those images do a job that a product catalogue cannot. A storage grid or a robot fleet is usually built to fit one building, so the companies show finished sites, walk-through videos and case studies named after their customers. Many also describe themselves as software companies as much as machine builders, and show control-room screens and dashboards that track robots, orders and stock in real time.

Trade fairs are where the sector meets its buyers. LogiMAT in Germany, ProMat in the United States and CeMAT are among the logistics shows where makers build working demonstration systems on their stands, and where new robots and workstations are often launched. Many of the companies also sell through partners and system integrators, so the same system can appear under more than one name on a show floor.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its equipment is made, and what has happened to it — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not the companies’ official colours or logos.

One name inside a larger group.

On 2 February 2017, Modern Materials Handling reported, Toyota Industries Corporation created a North American division called Toyota Advanced Logistics Solutions, run separately from its forklift business, and announced that it was acquiring Bastian Solutions as the first company in that structure, with closing targeted for April 2017. Bill Bastian II was to stay on as chief executive, and no management changes were planned. In 2019 the trade press was describing Bastian as “a Toyota Advanced Logistics Company.”

Toyota Industries went on to gather other warehouse businesses, including the Dutch maker Vanderlande and the German firm viastore. In April 2025 Robotics 24/7 reported that viastore’s North American operations had merged into Bastian Solutions under the Bastian name, keeping their office in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as Bastian’s pallet automation team; Aaron Jones was then Bastian’s president and chief executive.

The larger change came next. On 27 November 2025 Forkliftaction reported that Toyota Industries planned a new entity, Toyota Automated Logistics, under which Vanderlande’s warehousing business, Bastian Solutions and viastore would operate from April 2026, with Bastian and Vanderlande’s US warehouse business combined and Vanderlande keeping its airport and parcel work. The Toyota Automated Logistics website now says that, effective 1 April 2026, it “combines Bastian Solutions, Vanderlande’s warehousing business, and viastore under one unified brand,” and that it belongs to the Toyota Automated Logistics Group within Toyota Industries.

The Bastian name has not disappeared. The old Bastian Solutions web address now leads to Bastian Automation, whose site carries a Bastian Solutions, LLC copyright and sends warehousing and intralogistics enquiries to Toyota Automated Logistics.

For a design guide, Bastian Solutions shows how a family distributor’s name can become one brand among several inside a large industrial group, and then step back from its original market. Compare Dematic, another warehouse automation name inside a larger group, and AutoStore, whose storage grid Bastian has shown in its own systems. For this guide we use navy, a mid blue and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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