Getman Brand Guidelines: From a Concrete Wheelbarrow to Underground Scalers

A motorised wheelbarrow from South Haven, Michigan.

Getman Corporation builds underground mining machines in Bangor, Michigan, a small town in the southwest of the state. The company dates its story to 1954 and the Getman Brothers’ Construction Company of South Haven, on the Lake Michigan shore, whose first success was the Scoot-Crete, a small motorised wheelbarrow for moving concrete. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) gave the same account in a September 2023 profile, noting that the Scoot-Crete was used on parking ramps and roads and in the building of the Mackinac Bridge between 1954 and 1957. A December 2012 report by Second Wave Media gave a different date, describing Getman Corp. as founded in South Haven in 1971.

The move underground came from a customer. According to both the company and the MEDC, a uranium miner in Colorado modified a Scoot-Crete for use in an underground mine, and demand from miners grew; the company says the machine ended the days of mule-drawn carts in the trackless mines of the American West. Through the rest of the 1950s the Getman brothers adapted the machine further, and the MEDC says one of these adaptations became one of the first trackless diesel-powered underground product lines.

In the 1960s and 1970s the range widened. Getman credits itself with the first rubber-tyred drill jumbo carrier and the first explosives charger, both in the early 1960s, and the first mechanical scaler in the 1970s, claims the MEDC repeated in 2023. The A64 range, developed in the 1970s, is the backbone of the current line, the company says, and mines around the world have used thousands of A64 machines. In 1980 rising sales took Getman from a riverside factory in South Haven to its present headquarters in Bangor, where the first unit was commissioned in 1981. In the 1980s it entered underground coal mining with low-roof tow tractors and road-building machines.

Chargers, scalers, sprayers and carriers.

Getman makes what the trade calls production and production-support equipment: the mobile machines that work around the drill rigs and loaders of an underground hard-rock mine. Its catalogue is grouped into four families. Explosive chargers carry and load ANFO or emulsion explosives into drilled holes. Ground support machines include concrete sprayers for shotcrete and the scalers that strip loose rock from tunnel roofs and walls. Material transport covers remixers and agitators that carry concrete underground, along with logistics vehicles, and production support includes multi-cassette carriers, telehandlers and elevated work platforms.

One machine brought the company a state award. The A64 HD Water Cannon was named the first Michigan Manufactured Export of the Year at the Michigan Manufacturers Association’s 2023 Manufacturing Excellence Awards, the association’s MiMfg Magazine reported in its May/June 2024 issue. The machine uses a high-volume, high-pressure jet of water to loosen ore that has jammed in draw points, the funnels through which broken ore is fed by gravity in some underground mines; the magazine’s account, citing the company’s product manager, says crews had earlier used long poles or explosives for the job.

The coal and construction roots still show in the record. Second Wave Media listed explosives chargers, utility vehicles and coal equipment as Getman’s main lines in 2012. Today the company says it sells and supports its machines on six continents through a distributor network, and it has opened a customer support centre in Elko, Nevada, which it describes as placed to serve the state’s mining belt.

Exports have been built with public help. The MEDC profile describes how Getman worked with the state’s international trade team from 2017, using MI-STEP export grants between 2017 and 2019 for sales trips to Finland, Australia, South Africa, Zambia, Mexico and Indonesia, and a grant in the autumn of 2019 to translate its manuals into Spanish for customers in Mexico. The agency says the company reported growing export sales to Mexico and Latin America from 2020.

How mining equipment makers present themselves.

Mining equipment makers sell machines that most people never see at work. Their customers are mine operators, tunnelling contractors and quarry owners, and the machines spend their working lives underground or at the far end of an open pit. So the trade’s imagery tends to bring the site to the viewer: a drill rig in a floodlit tunnel, its booms reaching towards a rock face; a loader or haul truck in yellow or orange, picked out against grey stone; the beam of a headlamp in the dark.

Above ground, the favoured view is from high up. Photographs of open-pit mines show stepped benches cut into the earth, with trucks and drill rigs reduced to small bright shapes on the terraces. Underground pictures work the other way, close and cramped, with the machine filling the frame and the rock wall just beyond it.

Much of the rest of the visual language comes from proving that the machines work. Makers show equipment in test mines and at customer sites, and show it to the trade at fairs such as MINExpo International, which is organised by the US National Mining Association and describes itself as the industry’s largest global mining event; its next edition is scheduled for September 2028. Stands at such fairs put full-size rigs and loaders on display, often alongside screens showing the same machines below ground.

Behind the pictures sit very different companies. Some are divisions or spin-offs of large listed engineering groups; others are family firms or privately owned specialists built around one process, such as spraying concrete or charging explosives. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Third-generation and family-owned.

Getman describes itself as a third-generation, family-owned company, a phrase Second Wave Media also used in 2012. Its leadership page credits Dana Getman with guiding the business for more than four decades. The president and chief executive is Erik VanAllen, who already held the title when Second Wave reported on the company’s expansion in December 2012; the company says he recently marked twenty years with Getman.

The machines are designed and built in Michigan. In 2012 Second Wave Media reported that Getman, then employing 165 people in Bangor, would open a second manufacturing site in Comstock Township, in Kalamazoo County, creating 150 jobs, after also weighing locations in northern Indiana. The company says the Kalamazoo facility opened in 2013, after an expansion of the Bangor plant, and both the company and the MEDC link that growth to rising global demand in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Its facilities are now listed as Bangor and Kalamazoo in Michigan and Elko in Nevada.

The brand speaks in a plain, workmanlike register. Its stated mission is “Better Equipment, Better Service, Great Place to Work,” and the company says it was named to a 2023 list of the best places to work in Southwest Michigan. It has also commissioned a short film, The Letter, made with the Michigan production company Rhino, A Story Co, which tells the story of a miner and one of its scalers.

For a design guide, Getman shows how a family maker can keep a seventy-year origin story at the centre of an industrial brand. Compare Normet, the Finnish maker of underground mining equipment, and MacLean, the Ontario maker of underground mining vehicles. For this guide we use a mine yellow, a deep navy and a steel grey with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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