nexAir Brand Guidelines: A 1940 Memphis Welding Supplier, Now Part of Linde

A Memphis welding supplier, bought in 1950.

nexAir began as a welding-supply business in Memphis, Tennessee. The company’s history page says Standard Welders Supply was founded there in 1940, and nexAir marked 80 years in 2020; in January 2016 the trade magazine Chemical Engineering described it as a 75-year-old company.

The family behind it came from the gas trade. nexAir says R.Q. McEniry moved to Linde’s Memphis office in 1942 and bought Standard Welders Supply in 1950, the purchase it treats as the birth of its idea of “a full-service, family-built gas supplier.” His son, Bob McEniry, joined after college, in 1963 according to the company’s timeline, and in 1984, it says, Standard Welders bought the Linde plant in Memphis. Kevin McEniry, the founder’s grandson, joined in 1994.

The present name came from a merger. In 1996, nexAir says, Standard Welders Supply merged with Mid-South Oxygen, owned by the Heppel family, to form nexAir, with Bob McEniry as chief executive and Bill Vaughan as president. The timeline then shows the company moving beyond the mid-South into the Birmingham market in 2004 and into Atlanta in 2008, with Kevin McEniry becoming chief executive in 2007 and Bill Proctor named president.

Gases, welding and dry ice.

nexAir presents itself as a supplier of industrial, medical and specialty gases alongside welding supplies and equipment. Its website lists gases such as anhydrous ammonia and carbon monoxide, mixed diving gases, equipment repairs and welding equipment rental, and names markets including welding and metal fabrication, food and beverage, electronics production and university research. A Memphis Business Journal report reproduced on nexAir’s site described it in 2020 as a company that sells, packages and distributes medical, specialty and industrial gases, along with related products such as welding equipment, safety supplies and dry ice.

Dry ice has its own arm. nexAir says it formed nexAir Carbonic as a wholly owned subsidiary focused on dry-ice production, and later bought liquid carbon dioxide and dry-ice facilities in Millington, Tennessee, from Air Liquide. A Daily Memphian photograph from February 2021 shows blocks of dry ice being packaged at nexAir in Millington.

The company also makes claims about how its gases are made: it says all nexAir gases are produced at its own FDA-compliant, ISO 17025-certified plants, which it says operate around the clock. It also says it was one of 27 companies named in the first year of the US Best Managed Companies programme, sponsored by Deloitte Private and The Wall Street Journal, in 2020.

Staffing is part of the pitch. The company says it employs chemists, engineers, welding analysts, cryogenic technicians and medical equipment specialists, and that it measures and tracks complaints and shares the results with customers. Its slogan is “Forge Forward.”

Cylinders, tanks and air.

Industrial gas companies sell something nobody sees. Oxygen, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide and hydrogen are colourless, so the identity of a gas supplier has to live on the things that hold and move the product: the cylinder, the storage tank, the delivery truck and the plant where air is separated into its parts.

The cylinder is the most familiar object in the category. Rows of steel and aluminium bottles, their shoulders painted in colours that identify the contents, appear in almost every supplier’s photography, often chained in racks at a welding shop or a filling plant. Beside them stand the larger forms of the trade: white or pale-grey bulk tanks outside factories and hospitals, and long tanker trucks that carry liquefied gases from plant to customer, usually wearing the supplier’s name and colours along the side.

The plants themselves have become an image of their own. An air-separation unit is a tall column, often wrapped in cladding and pipework, that cools air until its components can be drawn off one by one. Photographed at night, lit against a dark sky, these columns give the sector its most dramatic pictures, and many companies use them in annual reports and on their home pages.

The human scenes are fewer and more settled. A welder behind a mask in a shower of sparks stands for the industrial side; a hospital corridor or a patient at home with an oxygen concentrator stands for the medical side. Between the hardware and those two scenes, most of the visual language of the category is set. The brands in this guide work within that shared vocabulary, and what separates them is largely the name on the truck and the colour of the paint.

From Praxair partner to Linde subsidiary.

nexAir’s growth ran alongside Praxair. In August 2012, Hydrocarbon Processing reported, Praxair and the Memphis-based distributor announced a joint venture in the Southeast: Praxair would contribute eight branches of its packaged-gas business in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee and take an equity stake in the combined business. Chemical Engineering reported in January 2016 that Praxair Distribution Southeast, a joint venture working in Florida and south-east Georgia since 1997, had been merged into nexAir. Before the merger, the magazine said, nexAir had locations in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee; the combination brought it to 67 locations and added coverage across Florida, with nexAir’s existing management continuing to lead the business.

The next step came from Linde. On 6 January 2020, according to the Memphis Business Journal report reproduced by nexAir, the company announced it had acquired Linde LifeGas and its packaged-gas businesses from Linde Gas North America: 16 LifeGas branches in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee and a production facility in Union City, Georgia, with about 200 employees, taking nexAir to 79 locations and 800 employees in ten states. nexAir says it runs that business under the nexAir Healthcare name, and that it moved its headquarters to Crosstown Concourse in Memphis.

Family ownership then ended. The Daily Memphian reported in October 2022 that nexAir had agreed to be acquired by Linde Gas & Equipment, a division of Linde plc. On 6 January 2023 Linde announced that its subsidiary Linde Gas & Equipment, which had held a minority interest in nexAir since 2012, had bought the remaining 77.2%, calling nexAir one of the largest independent packaged-gas distributors in the United States. Linde said the purchase complemented its existing packaged-gas business and expanded its footprint across the south-eastern United States, and the president of Linde Gas & Equipment described it as consistent with a strategy of “increasing network density.” The nexAir name remains in use on the company’s website.

For a design guide, nexAir shows how a regional distributor’s name, made up for a 1996 merger, can outlast the family ownership it was built under. Compare Praxair, its partner from 2012, and Linde, its owner since 2023. For this guide we use a deep teal, a warm copper and a pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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