Motion Industries Brand Guidelines: A 1946 Birmingham Bearing House, GPC & a One-Word Name

A Birmingham supply house renamed for movement.

Motion Industries traces its start to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1946. English Wikipedia says the business began as Owen Richards Co., an industrial supply company, which Caldwell Marks and William Spencer III bought that year. Citing a 2013 profile of Marks in The Birmingham News, it quotes the founders on the new name: “because everything we do moves – we’re in the bearing and transmission business.” Bearings and power transmission parts still lead the list of product groups the company is described by.

The company later joined Genuine Parts Company (GPC), the Atlanta parts distributor founded in 1928 by the brothers Carlyle and Malcolm Fraser and the owner of NAPA Auto Parts. English Wikipedia gives two dates for that step: a 1972 merger, citing The Birmingham News, and a 1976 acquisition, citing the trade magazine Industrial Distribution. Inside GPC, Motion became the Industrial Parts Group, while NAPA, which English Wikipedia dates to 1925, formed the automotive side of the business. The same source describes the two as GPC’s primary business segments today, after the sale of the office-products distributor S.P. Richards in 2020.

Much of the later growth came through acquisitions. English Wikipedia lists Berry Bearing in 1993; the Canadian distributors BC Bearing, US Bearings and Norcan in 2010; and Kaman Distribution Group, a supplier of automation, conveyance and fluid power products, in 2022. GPC’s electrical products division, EIS, was merged into Motion in 2018 and sold in October 2019, the same source says. The headquarters stayed in Birmingham throughout.

From bearings to automation.

English Wikipedia, citing Industrial Distribution, describes Motion as starting out as a distributor of bearings and industrial supplies and widening into automation, conveyance, hydraulics, fluid power and robotics. The product groups it lists run from bearings and mechanical power transmission to hose, belting and gaskets, process pumps, material handling, seals and industrial supplies, alongside fabrication and repair services. Three business units carry the name into specialist work: Motion Automation Intelligence, shortened to Motion Ai, Motion Conveyance Solutions and Motion Repair & Services.

The scale is set out on GPC’s own pages. Its company overview, read in November 2026, says the Industrial Parts Group operates under the Motion brand through about 720 branches and service centres in North America and Australasia, serving more than 180,000 customers in maintenance, repair and operations and in original equipment manufacturing. In North America it lists 19 distribution centres and about 600 branches and service centres; in Australasia, 13 distribution centres and more than 120 branches and service centres. In its February 2026 announcement GPC put the range at more than 10 million SKUs. English Wikipedia gives about 9,000 employees as of 2023.

GPC’s overview also describes the customer mix: about 80 per cent maintenance, repair and operations customers and about 20 per cent original equipment manufacturers, across more than 14 end markets, among them equipment and machinery, food products, pulp and paper, iron and steel, and automotive. Its February 2026 announcement summarised Motion’s offer as fluid power, automation, conveyance and repair services, on top of the long-standing maintenance and repair range.

The Australasian arm, Motion Asia Pacific, presents itself as a group of businesses serving Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Singapore and the Pacific. Its website says it offers more than 350,000 products from over 3,000 suppliers through nearly 200 branches, service centres and workshops, and traces its customer-service idea to one of its bearings businesses in the 1950s. GPC took a 35 per cent stake in the Australian industrial distributor Inenco Group in 2017, English Wikipedia says.

How distributors present themselves.

Industrial and electronics distributors mostly sell products made by other companies, so their identities are built less on objects than on names, ranges, branches and service. The figures they publish are counts: Genuine Parts Company said in February 2026 that its Motion business offers more than 10 million SKUs, and Motion Asia Pacific says it draws on more than 3,000 suppliers.

The catalogue remains the core of that presentation, now spread across print, websites and electronic ordering. Cromwell’s careers site describes customers reaching the company through its product catalogue, its website and electronic data interchange, as well as through branches and sales teams, so the same range has to read clearly on a page, on a screen and inside a purchasing system.

The branch and the vending machine carry the name into the field. GPC’s company overview counts about 720 Motion branches and service centres across North America and Australasia, while East Midlands Business Link reported in January 2026 that Cromwell manages on-site vending machines inside large customer facilities. In both cases the brand sits on a fascia, a counter or a cabinet in someone else’s workplace.

Ownership shapes the corporate pages. Cromwell supplies branded and own-brand tools, the same publication reported, and it now appears on the investment pages of its private equity owner, Aurelius; Motion appears on GPC’s “Our Companies” page beside NAPA. Names are often simplified along the way: Motion Industries announced a rebrand as simply Motion in January 2021, English Wikipedia says. This guide sets out who founded each distributor, who owns it and how it describes its own range, and attributes each figure to the source that gives it.

One word, and a separation announced.

The name itself was shortened. In January 2021, the year of its 75th anniversary, Motion Industries announced a rebrand as simply Motion, English Wikipedia says, citing the trade magazine MDM. The registered company is still Motion Industries, Inc., headquartered in Birmingham, but the single word now heads the business units and the Asia Pacific arm alike, and GPC’s pages refer to the industrial business as Motion throughout.

A larger change was announced on 17 February 2026, when GPC said it intended to separate into two independent listed companies, one for its automotive parts business and one for its industrial parts business, which it described as operating under the Motion brand. On 9 September 2026 GPC said that, once the separation was complete, the automotive business would keep the Genuine Parts Company name and the industrial business would operate as Motion, with Will Stengel, GPC’s chairman and chief executive, moving across to lead it in the same roles. GPC said in February that the separation did not require a shareholder vote but depended on final approval by its board and on a Form 10 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Its third-quarter report of 20 October 2026 still described the separation as in progress: announced in February 2026; not completed at the time of writing.

For a design guide, Motion shows how a long corporate name can be cut to one word that works across branches, service units and countries; the shorter name keeps the word the founders chose in 1946. Compare Grainger, another North American maintenance supplier, and MSC Industrial Supply. For this guide we use ink blue, steel grey and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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