Wabash Brand Guidelines: A 1985 Lafayette Start-Up, DuraPlate & One Blue Name

Three trailer executives and a corn store in Lafayette.

Wabash began in Lafayette, Indiana, in April 1985. According to a mid-1990s profile in the International Directory of Company Histories, it was co-founded by Jerry Ehrlich, formerly president of the Indiana trailer maker Monon Corp., with two fellow Monon executives, Ronald J. Klimara and William M. Hoover. Two years earlier the investor Victor Posner had acquired Monon’s parent, Evans Products, and begun selling assets; Ehrlich’s offers to buy Monon were refused, so the three left to start their own company and were soon joined by fourteen other former Monon employees, the profile says.

They set up about thirty miles south of Monon, first leasing an abandoned factory that local farmers were using to store corn. The first trailer, the profile says, was reportedly built on two sawhorses and finished in August 1985, and the first customer was Sears, Roebuck & Co., a former Monon customer that ordered ten trailers. Ehrlich ran the company as president, Hoover led sales and Klimara finance; English Wikipedia adds that Jerry Ehrlich’s brother Rodney led engineering. Early customers included Heartland Express, Schneider National and Dart Transit.

Wabash became a public company in 1991 and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker WNC. Inc. magazine named Jerry Ehrlich its Entrepreneur of the Year in 1992, the International Directory of Company Histories notes.

Plate walls, a road-rail trailer and a composite panel.

Wabash’s first signature product came from a customer request. When Dart Transit asked for better use of trailer space, the International Directory of Company Histories says, Wabash answered with the aluminum plate trailer: side-by-side four-foot aluminum panels joined to posts on the outside of the trailer, in place of the overlapping aluminum-covered plywood then common. The thinner walls gave a 101-inch interior width, against 99 inches before, so one pallet could be loaded lengthwise and one widthwise. Wabash patented the design, the profile says.

The second was the RoadRailer, a trailer that runs on highway tyres and can also ride on rail bogies. English Wikipedia says Wabash built RoadRailers for Thrall Car Manufacturing from 1987 and bought the rights in 1991; the profile adds an AutoRailer variant that enclosed up to six cars. Wabash began making refrigerated vans in 1995 and in 1996 introduced DuraPlate, a composite wall panel, according to English Wikipedia, which also lists DuraPlate HD in 2003, the DuraPlate AeroSkirt side skirt and the company’s first truck bodies in 2015.

Growth also came by acquisition. English Wikipedia lists the US manufacturing and sales business of Fruehauf Trailer in 1997, the Breadner Group of Kitchener, Ontario, in 2000, Transcraft in 2006, assets of Benson in 2008, Walker Group Holdings — with the Walker, Brenner and Bulk Tank names — in 2012 and Supreme Industries, the truck-body maker, in 2017. A wood-flooring business built from the Cloud companies of Arkansas became Wabash Wood Products, based in Harrison.

The result was a portfolio of names on dry vans, reefers, flatbeds, tankers and truck bodies, each with its own badge. That is the background to the 2022 rebrand.

How trailer makers present themselves.

Truck trailer makers sell a product that spends its working life on the road, and much of their imagery starts there: a long semi-trailer seen side-on on a motorway, a curtainsider rounding a bend, a tipper on a building site. The trailer is often the largest flat surface in a fleet, so the maker’s own name tends to sit small, on a plate, a mudguard or the front wall, while the customer’s livery fills the sides.

Bodies set the look of each category. Refrigerated box trailers are usually shown in plain white, with a cooling unit on the front wall, because the panels are built to be clean and easy to brand. Curtainsiders carry printed fleet colours on their sliding sides. Tippers are shown with their steel or aluminium bodies raised, and low-loaders with a heavy load chained down.

Factory photography is the second register. Makers show lines of bare chassis waiting for axles, paint and coating halls, sandwich panels being bonded and finished trailers parked in rows outside the plant. Product names tend to be short codes or coined words that sort ranges by body type, which helps fleets order the same specification year after year.

The third register is the trade fair and the dealer yard. IAA Transportation in Hanover and similar shows give makers a stand where new chassis, lighter bodies and telematics are lined up for fleets and the trade press. Dealers, rental firms and used-trailer centres then carry the brand into regional markets, where the customer is usually a haulier, a fleet manager or a logistics buyer rather than a member of the public.

From Wabash National and six sub-brands to a single name.

On 2 February 2022 the company announced that it had rebranded the corporation and its portfolio under one name, Wabash. Its press release said it would no longer go to market as Wabash National or under the trade names it had acquired over the previous sixteen years — Benson, Brenner, Bulk Tank, Supreme, Transcraft and Walker — and that van trailers, platform trailers, tank trailers, truck bodies, process systems and parts would all carry the Wabash name. The legal entities did not change, the company said, and it stayed on the New York Stock Exchange as WNC. The same release named its molded structural composite for refrigerated equipment EcoNex Technology, and launched a website at OneWabash.com. Inside Indiana Business reported the same day that Lafayette-based Wabash had rebranded from its former name, Wabash National Corp., quoting chief executive Brent Yeagy on uniting the legacy brands as “One Wabash.”

The rebrand reached the road that summer. In July 2022, Work Truck Online reported, Wabash unveiled its first trailer with the new logo, and the company said its whole line would carry it by the end of the year. Lafayette’s mayor, quoted in the same report, described it as “the new blue Wabash logo.” The company’s purpose line, “Changing How the World Reaches You,” appears in its releases. English Wikipedia adds that in February 2025 Wabash acquired TrailerHawk.ai as part of a trailer-as-a-service offer.

The company has also faced a major court case. In March 2025 FreightWaves reported that a Missouri circuit judge had sharply reduced the punitive damages a St. Louis City jury awarded against Wabash in a product-liability lawsuit over the rear impact guard of a 2004 Wabash trailer involved in a 2019 crash, while refusing the company’s request for a new trial. Wabash said it continued to believe the verdict was not supported by the facts or the law and was evaluating its legal options.

For a design guide, Wabash shows how a maker built by acquisition can fold many badges into one name and one colour. Compare Great Dane, another large American trailer name, and Utility Trailer. For this guide we use navy, a mid blue and aluminum grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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