Shaw Supply, a wholesale plumbing and mechanical distributor that opened its doors in Long Island City, New York, in August 2025, is a brand-new independent in an industry where that’s become a rarity. Before founder Ray Shaw signed his own leases, he worked double shifts to learn someone else’s distribution company inside and out.

Early in his career, Shaw worked as long as 19 hours a day, determined to master how to run a wholesale distribution company. Some nights the drive home didn’t seem worth it, so he’d catch a few hours of sleep in his car in the company lot and be back on the floor before the first shift started. That willingness to outwork whatever was in front of him is the thread that runs through Shaw’s entire career, from the afternoon he unloaded his first truck to the morning he opened the doors of his own company.

Consolidation is a defining story in wholesale distribution right now. Every month brings another acquisition; another family name folded into a larger platform. In an industry where margins are tight, partnerships are vital and staying ahead is essential, opening a brand-new independent distributorship isn’t just unusual. It’s close to unheard of.

Shaw did it anyway. Shaw Supply operates out of a 67,000-square-foot warehouse with 70,000 square feet of yard space, five minutes from the Midtown Tunnel and wedged between two of the busiest highways into New York City. Shaw built it without a family business behind him, without an inheritance, and without the kind of pedigree that tends to open doors. He built it the way he built everything else: by learning every job from the ground up and refusing to believe anyone who told him he couldn’t do the next one.

Mistake — or opportunity?

“Honestly, my career started in the industry by mistake,” Shaw says. “It wasn’t something I was looking to do, but obviously, everyone needs a job.”

As a young man on Long Island, interviewing for a warehouse job he didn’t particularly want, Shaw failed the interview on purpose. Two weeks later the company called him back after the person they’d hired instead didn’t work out. He took the job. The boss showed him an elbow fitting and asked him if he knew what it was. “Honestly sir, I have no idea,” Shaw recalls saying.

“He told me, ‘It’s OK, we’ll train you,’” Shaw recalls. “And starting in that career, when I jump into anything, I want to be the best at it.”

Shaw jumped in — he picked orders, then double-checked them. He found he had a knack for reorganizing warehouses and building systems where none had existed. He moved to the counter, then got promoted. After five and a half years, a friend mentioned his name to a headhunter filling a role at Bruce Supply, based in Brooklyn. Shaw interviewed with Bruce Weksler, co-owner of Bruce Supply — at the time a roughly $120 million company spanning two city blocks, a world away from the small supply house where he’d spent his career so far.

“I was with a tiny supply house,” Shaw says. “I couldn’t even fathom it.”

Bruce Weksler offered nearly triple his salary, and an old-fashioned bidding war followed between his old employer and his hopeful new one — one that ended only when Weksler told him plainly the back-and-forth had to stop. It was Shaw’s sister, whose career is in HR, who settled it for him.

“She pointed out something very important,” Shaw says. “Five years, and I never got an increase. Bruce Weksler saw something in me — and that immediately changed my life.”

Shaw asked Weksler if he could start in two months. “I didn’t want to leave my employer in a bad place,” he says. Shaw recalls Weksler’s response: “If you give me your word you will show up.” That was easy. Shaw is a man of his word.

He came in as warehouse manager. He stayed 13 years.

Be the best

Everything on his resume, Shaw admits now, was more aspiration than fact. He’d never managed anyone and suddenly had 48 people reporting to him.

“I had to learn everything from the bottom up,” he says. Bruce Weksler and his brother, co-owner Joe Weksler, handed him the authority to fix a disorganized operation and kept promoting him as he did. Operations became operations and purchasing. That became operations, purchasing and sales management. Before long Shaw was negotiating with unions, purchasing $150 million in goods a year, and running the day-to-day operations of Bruce Supply largely on his own.

“Bruce and Joe Weksler were two of the greatest people you could ever meet,” Shaw says. 

Shaw’s father was an important part of his life until his death when Shaw was 17. In the years that followed, the Wekslers would become influential mentors and more. “They became father figures to me and changed my life.” 

Joe Weksler pushed him on what couldn’t be learned from a warehouse floor.

“He used to make me sit at his desk for 30 minutes while he was on the phone,” Shaw recalls. “I’d say, ‘Joe, I’ve got work to do.’ He’d say, ‘I know you’re busier than me. But I want you to listen to how I carry a conversation.’” Shaw continued his upward trajectory, eventually ascending to the role of chief operating officer, running operations that included the company’s headquarters and six other locations in New York and New Jersey.

Joe Weksler died of a heart attack in 2022, at 56, only months after Shaw had taken on enough of his workload that Wexler had finally started taking Fridays off. Bruce Supply — by then the largest supplier in IMARK Plumbing (now Current Distribution Group, or CDG) — was acquired by a national wholesaler not long after.

Missing the parts he loved

The sale sent Shaw to the new company for a year and a half, during which time it invested in him with executive coaching and leadership training.

He discovered that corporate life had cost him the part of the business he loved most.

“I lost what the fun part of it was,” Shaw says. “When my career started, I was involved in everything, and I enjoyed it.” Shaw recalls the long days of working in the warehouse, wearing multiple hats and being in “the trenches.” During those years, he developed close partnerships not only with contractors and the company’s other customers, but also with manufacturers and reps. “The (new) company promoted work-life balance. They wanted me to work seven hours a day and take an hour for lunch. I don’t remember taking a lunch in my career,” Shaw says.

He remembers the exact morning that convinced him to leave — a 15-minute commute that somehow felt longer than the hour and a half he used to drive. It wasn’t fulfilling the drive he had to be involved in every aspect of the business.

Betting on himself

Shaw fielded offers from some of the largest independent firms in the country, one of which offered to fly him in by private jet every week. None of them offered what he’d had with Bruce and Joe Wexler.

“Everybody wanted to hire me for my experience, my knowledge and the team I could bring with me,” Shaw says. He knew the opportunity was now. Shaw told himself, “I might as well do it for myself.”

By the beginning of 2025, he had purchased the domain for Shaw Supply and was well underway to find an investor wiling to fund the business without wanting to run it. “I’ve got the experience to do it,” he says, of starting up a new company. “You just need a lot of money to do what I’m doing.” When the stars all aligned within that three-month window, Shaw says, “It was like hitting the lotto!”

He gave his two weeks’ notice and started building Shaw Supply from scratch.

Josh Aberman, CEO of Lehman Pipe and Supply, has known Shaw for more than a decade, dating back to his time leading procurement at Bruce Supply. “From the beginning, Ray has been a true student of our industry, always willing to learn, put in the work, and remain humble throughout the process,” Aberman says. “This is not an easy industry, nor is it for the faint of heart. Ray had a strong opportunity with his previous employer, but he wanted something more. He wanted to build something of his own, create a lasting impact, and leave his mark.

“I have tremendous respect for the courage it takes to make that decision, and I look forward to seeing everything Ray and Shaw Supply accomplish in this next chapter.”

Building an empire

Shaw spent nights and weekends touring buildings with four real estate agents, telling each the same thing: whoever found the right property first would get the deal. He couldn’t find a 30,000-square-foot building with a usable yard and enough ceiling height to operate. What he found instead was a derelict 130,000-square-foot building, far bigger than needed and in far worse shape, but workable.

Rather than pay a general contractor roughly $1.5 million to renovate it, Shaw ran the construction himself.

“I hired every trade, from the carpenter to the electricians to the concrete guy,” he says. “I did the office design, the buildout. I was entrenched.” For Shaw, “It was easy for me.”

He signed the lease in mid-April 2025. He’d wanted to open the Monday after the Fourth of July; the building wasn’t ready, so Shaw Supply opened its doors July 7 instead — roughly four and a half months after signing the lease, racking installed, aisles wire-guided and barcoded, purchase orders written by hand at night, ready to load into the company’s new ERP system the moment pricing came through.

“Businesses take a lifetime to do this,” Shaw says. “I can’t believe we did it in that short a period.”

Like trading LeBron James

Shaw came close to building the company alone. His fiancée, Krissy Laloo, handled payroll and compliance those first months, unpaid, alongside a handful of hires brought on as the buildout progressed. But the hires that mattered most followed him once their retention agreements at his previous employer expired — key salespeople and operators who’d worked under him for more than a decade, and whom other distributors were actively chasing.

“These guys were like trading LeBron James,” Shaw says. “I got three superstars, and they knew they were going to bring in business.”

Personality drove every hire, he says, more than resume or title.

“You’ve got to have the right character, and you’ve got to be driven,” Shaw says. “I needed guys who were going to grow with me, not those at the end of their careers just looking to coast into retirement.”

Several of the people who joined him walked away from larger, better-funded companies with stronger benefits — a reflection of Shaw’s own approach, taking care of others while building something that lasts. “I’m not in it for the money,” Shaw says. “I want my team to make more money. I want them to succeed. That’s huge for me.”

“When I walk into the office, nobody stops. I don’t want to be the owner who makes people fake-act like they’re working. There is time for play here. Have fun. Don’t make this a prison. Work should not feel like work. That’s the one thing I valued when I worked 15 hours a day, it did not feel like work. I enjoyed it, and that’s what I want for my company,” Shaw says.

Krissy Laloo, Shaw’s fiancée, has watched that ethic up close for years. “Most people know Ray as the CEO of Shaw Supply, but I’ve had the privilege of knowing the man behind the title,” she says. “Long before Shaw Supply existed, I watched him give everything he had to his work, always leading with integrity, heart, and an unwavering commitment to doing things the right way.

“What I admire most isn’t just what he’s built, it’s who he is. No matter how busy he is, he always makes time for people. He leads with kindness, treats everyone with respect, and is always willing to help, offer guidance, or simply listen.”

We’ll send a truck

Shaw Supply stocks a full line of PVF, fire protection and suppression, and plumbing fixtures, and runs its own in-house fabrication shop — a diversification strategy Shaw says he borrowed directly from watching Bruce Supply weather the pandemic. The company has built relationships with more than 70 brand partners and continues to forge new ones through its buying group.

The respect Shaw has built across the industry runs deep. When he approached Current Distribution Group, formerly IMARK Plumbing, about membership — typically a lengthy vetting process — he was welcomed in without the traditional course, a reflection of a lifetime spent building partnerships on trust and a reputation for doing what’s right.

Shaw Supply also holds Minority Business Enterprise certification through the National Minority Supplier Development Council, as well as MBE certification through New York City’s Department of Small Business Services.

“In a world that’s becoming increasingly transactional, I still believe business is built on trust, integrity and genuinely caring about other people’s success,” Shaw says. He adds, “The opportunities I’ve had in my career came because people believed in me, took a chance on me, and invested their time in helping me grow. Relationships matter.”

On the company’s website, in big letters, is the tagline: “Service Driven, Supply Ready.” The tagline is followed by: “We send a truck, not an excuse. That’s the difference.”

“We’re not going to be the ones who say, ‘We made a mistake, we’ll get it to you tomorrow,’” he says. “We’re going to send a car, a truck, an Uber. We’re getting it to you, because we understand what it costs a contractor to be on a job site without materials.”

That commitment doesn’t stop at business hours — Shaw once made an emergency delivery to a customer himself on a Sunday morning.

“It’s how you back it up,” he says. “Mistakes happen on both sides. It’s just how you fix it. We want you to feel like we’re a partner with you.” And it shows.

The company now employs 47 people and, less than a year in, has already outpaced its own sales projections — and people are noticing. At CDG’s member meeting this year, the company received the Victory PVF Member of the Year Award.

John Aykroyd, president of Current Distribution Group, says it best. “Ray Shaw is exactly the kind of leader that reminds you why independent distribution matters. His work ethic, the way he’s built Shaw Supply, and his commitment to the people around him speak for themselves. Ray embodies the entrepreneurial spirit that has always been the backbone of this industry, and I’m proud to have him as part of our Current Distribution Group family.”

Building for the future

I asked Shaw what his drivers are in business and in life. “I want my team to win — everyone who bet on me, whether that’s in a career or financially. But I also want to build a legacy,” Shaw says.

He reflected on the importance of family and connection. “My family didn’t come from much, so I want something my daughter (now 3 years old) can grow into and take over one day. I’m not looking to sell. I want to be remembered — not just as a savvy business guy, but as someone who genuinely cared, helped a lot of families, and left a legacy people actually remember.”

“I want people to know that there is still tremendous opportunity in this industry,” Shaw says. “I didn’t come from a traditional path. I wasn’t handed a business. I didn’t have a prestigious education or a family company waiting for me. I started unloading trucks in a yard.”

He still believes it’s one of the greatest industries in America — one where a willingness to learn, work and sacrifice can take someone as far as they’re willing to go. It’s the same message he hopes his own story sends: that a warehouse floor isn’t a ceiling, it’s a starting point.

“If there’s one thing I want people to take away, it’s this,” Shaw says. “Success isn’t about where you start. It’s about how committed you are to becoming better every day, and what you’re willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals.”

Shaw says he wants Shaw Supply to be something that lasts, not something built to be sold.

Somewhere in Long Island City tonight, the lights at Shaw Supply will likely still be on past closing, a truck sitting ready out back just in case a call comes in. It’s the same 19-hour-a-day habit that got Ray Shaw here in the first place, just pointed, for the first time, at a building with his own name on it.