Excel Dryer Brand Guidelines: The East Longmeadow Hand Dryer Maker Behind the XLERATOR

A small Massachusetts factory and a product people disliked.

Excel Dryer is a hand dryer maker in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. English Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1963 and built hand dryers at its East Longmeadow factory from the start.

Its modern history begins with a change of owner. Denis Gagnon bought the company in 1997, the company and English Wikipedia both say. Excel Dryer’s website gives his background as an MBA from Western New England College, then manufacturing and marketing jobs at Milton Bradley and Hasbro, where he was vice president for international business, and a spell as executive vice president of Bassett Boat Company. Speaking to NPR’s All Things Considered in February 2013, Gagnon summed up what he had bought: an experienced workforce, a quality product, a good name for customer service — and “a product that people hated to use,” because drying hands took too long.

The fix came from outside. NPR’s Robert Siegel reported that Invent Resources, a group of four scientists, three of them from MIT, who worked with companies on new product ideas, had come up with the idea of a hand dryer using very dry air and shaped nozzles. One of them, Richard Pavelle, phoned Gagnon after the idea had been turned down by World Dryer, which NPR called the giant of the field. English Wikipedia also names Sol Aisenberg and George Freedman among the scientists. At Excel, NPR reported, a staff member milled prototype after prototype, balancing noise against drying power.

The XLERATOR and its family.

The result was the XLERATOR, launched in 2001, English Wikipedia says, after about three and a half years of development according to NPR. Gagnon told NPR that at trade shows he had to coax doubtful visitors out of the aisles to try it. Excel Dryer now presents the XLERATOR as a pioneering high-speed, energy-efficient hand dryer and claims the top spot in sales and specification; those are the company’s own claims. NPR noted that other makers followed, including Dyson with the Airblade.

The XLERATOR became a family of products. The website lists the XLERATOR eco, a version that runs without heat; the ThinAir, a surface-mounted dryer that English Wikipedia dates to 2015; and the XLERATORsync, a dryer mounted on the sink, which Wikipedia dates to 2018. The company says the XLERATORsync is part of its D|13 Sink System, which it presents as its start in integrated sinks, and that the dryers can be specified with an electrostatic HEPA filter and a range of covers and accessories.

Design has also become a public project. Excel Dryer says it worked with CoDesign Collaborative, a nonprofit that uses design for social change, on a summer challenge in which eight Greater Boston high school students, guided by a design director from the architecture firm Gensler, created artwork for dryer covers; the finished dryers were donated to the city of Boston.

How washroom brands present themselves.

Washroom hygiene is a design field most people meet without noticing. The hand dryer by the airport gate, the towel dispenser in an office corridor and the soap unit above a stadium basin are chosen not by the people who use them but by architects, facility managers and cleaning contractors. The makers of these products speak first to that professional buyer, and their brands are built to read clearly in a specification sheet or a trade catalogue as much as on a wall.

Much of the work is systems design. A paper towel or soap brand usually sells a dispenser together with the refill made to fit it, so the visible object on the wall carries the name while the paper, foam or gel inside is what is bought again and again. Hand dryer makers sell the opposite way: one machine, mounted once, with filters, covers and accessories around it. Both approaches lean on a small number of named ranges rather than long product lists.

Materials do much of the talking. Stainless steel fittings, white and grey plastics and plain labelling recur across catalogues, for products that may end up in very different washrooms, from a hospital to a hotel lobby. Colour tends to appear in small accents, on a cover, a light or a refill pack, rather than across the whole object.

The category also presents itself in person. Trade fairs such as Interclean and the ISSA Show, where cleaning and facility-management suppliers gather, give makers a place to launch dispensers, dryers and digital refill services, and some fairs run innovation awards of their own. The guides in this series look at how individual makers handle those shared conventions.

A family company that sells on where it builds.

Where Excel Dryer makes its products is central to how it presents itself. The company says all of its products are Made in USA Certified, that it tries to source parts locally where it can, and that it is a family-run business; English Wikipedia says the dryers are made in the United States with most parts from American suppliers. NPR’s 2013 visit found 38 people assembling dryers in East Longmeadow, in a plant Siegel described as remarkably un-automated, with workers attaching circuit boards and making the optic sensor by hand. Gagnon told NPR the company used American components and machinery as far as possible.

The everyday product line is described in practical terms. On its website the company says the current dryers offer adjustable speed and sound control, adjustable heat settings on most models, multi-voltage operation and a service light visible from outside the unit, and it calls the ThinAir surface-mounted and ADA compliant. The site is published in more than twenty country and language versions, from the United Kingdom and Canada to Brazil, Türkiye and Poland, under the headline “Throwing In The Towel Globally.”

Ownership has stayed with the Gagnon family since 1997; NPR called it a family-owned company in 2013. The company’s website names Denis Gagnon as president and as the inventor of the XLERATOR, and says he works with members of his family in the business. In a quotation on that page he says he is proud to be an American manufacturer of products people enjoy using.

The company also leans on documentation in its pitch to architects. It says it has published a product category rule for hand dryers along with Environmental Product Declarations and Health Product Declarations, and it offers specification tools and continuing-education courses for architects and designers on its website. Its slogan for the XLERATOR, “Original. Patented.”, makes the same point about origins.

For a design guide, Excel Dryer shows how a small manufacturer can build an identity on one product and one town. Compare World Dryer, the older American dryer maker NPR named, and Dyson, which entered the field later. For this guide we use charcoal, a brushed steel and a red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Excel Dryer’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.