Dane Scag, BOB-CAT and a company that began in 1983.

Scag is the brand of Scag Power Equipment, a maker of commercial and residential lawn mowers and turf equipment based in Mayville, Wisconsin. The company describes itself as “a division of Metalcraft of Mayville, Inc.,” and dates its founding to 1983. Its own account of the early years is brief: “Originally, the Scag® product was manufactured under contract with Metalcraft of Mayville in Mayville, Wisconsin. In 1986, Metalcraft purchased Scag Power Equipment.” So the brand and the factory that builds it were linked from the start, three years before they came under the same ownership.

The name is a surname. The trade magazine Lawn & Landscape, in an article published on 29 October 2013, identified Dane Scag as the man “who founded Scag Mowers and established several other brands of landscape maintenance equipment.” According to that article, he began in the industry by founding BOB-CAT in the 1970s, a mowing-equipment brand for which he designed a commercial-grade 21-inch walk-behind mower. After he sold BOB-CAT to the British agricultural-machinery maker Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies, the magazine said, he went on to found Scag Power Equipment.

Accounts of the earliest Scag machine differ in wording. Lawn & Landscape said the company’s debut product was a three-wheel mowing tractor; Scag’s own website says the company started with a single commercial mower model, “a gear-drive rider.” The magazine also said that when Metalcraft of Mayville bought the company in 1986, Dane Scag stayed on as president. He left his namesake company in 1991, it reported, and in 1996 founded Great Dane Power Equipment, where he created a stand-on mower called the Surfer, before selling Great Dane to John Deere in December 2000. Lawn & Landscape reported his death in October 2013, quoting a distributor who described him as someone who listened to dealers and built what they asked for. The brand still carries his name.

A luggage maker, a die-sinking shop and the Gallun family.

Scag’s parent has a longer history than the mower brand. In a press release dated 22 December 2020, published on Scag’s website to mark Metalcraft of Mayville’s centenary, the company traced its heritage to the Peerless Traveling Goods Company, founded in Mayville in 1920, which made luggage until it ceased operations and was sold in 1958. In 1926, the release says, the J. Dorst Company, a die-sinking business, also began in Mayville and later turned to metal stamping, producing parts for the automotive industry as well as for Peerless.

The release follows the business through several names. The Dorst company became Dorst Metalcraft in the 1940s, it says, shifting its focus to sheet-metal fabricating to customer contract specifications, and in 1958 bought the assets of Peerless Traveling Goods. In 1973 Dorst Metalcraft was bought by Edwin A. “Ned” Gallun, Jr., and within a year a new plant was built on land at the corner of Slag Road and Highway V. In 1974 the company officially became Metalcraft of Mayville, Inc., and, the release notes, a section of County Highway V was renamed Metalcraft Drive.

Metalcraft kept doing contract metal fabrication for other industries, the release says, but entered the commercial-mower business with its purchase of Scag Power Equipment in 1986, “whose products had been built under contract by Metalcraft since Scag’s beginnings in 1983.” In later years, it adds, Metalcraft expanded with factories in West Bend and Beaver Dam, an automation division made up of FJR Manufacturing in West Bend and Gamache Systems in New Berlin, and Versatran of Watertown, a maker of heavy-duty truck beds sold under the “Retriever” name. The release quotes Martin Gallun as chairman and chief executive.

Where the machines are made is a central part of how the company presents itself. Scag says it is independently owned and that every machine “starts off as sheet steel or tube steel,” which it says it punches, presses, bends, cuts, welds, paints, assembles, packages and ships in its Wisconsin factories in Mayville, West Bend, Beaver Dam, Fall River and New Berlin, with plastic tanks moulded at a plastics facility in Horicon. “Scag makes its own outdoor power equipment; nobody else makes machines for us… and we do not make mowers for other brands,” the company says.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make lawn mowers and outdoor power equipment: walk-behind and riding mowers, zero-turn machines, tillers, trimmers, chainsaws and the engines that drive them. Lawn-mower and outdoor-power brands sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that began in a barn or a small workshop to names that now belong to much larger industrial groups, and a single brand can be sold through independent dealers, hardware chains or both.

An outdoor-power brand’s identity is usually carried less by one machine than by a name, a livery colour and the decals and dealer signs that go with it, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, been licensed to another maker or moved its factories over the decades. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its machines are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its machines are made and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Big cats, a slogan and a made-in-Wisconsin message.

Scag’s identity begins with a short surname, which ties the brand to the inventor that Lawn & Landscape named as its founder. The name has stayed in place under Metalcraft ownership since 1986, even though Dane Scag himself left the company in 1991.

The second element is the slogan. Scag’s website repeats the phrase “Simply the Best” across its pages, using it for the company’s mowers, for the people who make them (“We are hardworking Americans making ‘Simply the Best’ equipment,” it says) and for its claims about constant product changes. The slogan appears beside the name across the site.

The third element is product naming. Scag’s current riding mowers carry names drawn largely from big cats, including the Turf Tiger II, Cheetah II and Tiger Cat II, alongside the Patriot, Freedom Z and Liberty Z models; its stand-on mowers are called V-Ride. Its website also lists equipment beyond mowers, among them debris blowers, truck loaders and Jackal stand-on mini skid steers, and promotes an owners’ community under the name Scag Nation along with a Scag Racing programme. The structure is a surname at the top, model names underneath and a slogan across the range.

The fourth element is the factory story. Scag puts its Wisconsin plants at the centre of its message, telling buyers its equipment is “proudly designed, fabricated and assembled in the USA” and listing the towns where that happens. Metalcraft’s own history, from a luggage maker and a die-sinking shop to a contract fabricator and then a mower company, gives that message a long local background in Mayville.

For a design guide, Scag shows how a founder’s surname, a short slogan and a family of big-cat model names can carry a commercial brand, backed by a parent company whose roots are in sheet metal. Compare it with Exmark, another commercial-mower brand from the Midwest, and with Dixie Chopper, another American zero-turn mower brand. For this guide we use orange, black and rust with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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