Chief has added two distributors to its extensive sales and service network. New Orleans Equipment Company of Harahan, La., will support customers in Louisiana and south central Mississippi, while Collision Equipment Experts, Inc., of Lake in the Hills, Ill., will cover the Chicago, central Illinois and western Indiana regions. Both companies will carry the full Chief line, including frame racks, benches, vehicle-anchoring systems, measuring systems, vehicle frame specifications, welders, rivet guns and more.

New Orleans Equipment Company has been in the auto body business for more than 16 years. Owner Bernard Triche says Chief is a perfect fit for his company.

“We share the same philosophy about customer support as Chief. We’re all about responding quickly to our customers’ needs, working hard to keep them up and running, and helping them understand their equipment so they can be as profitable as possible,” he said.

Don Putney, president of Collision Equipment Experts, has served the collision industry for more than 40 years. He was a body and paint technician, body shop manager and unibody repair instructor for I-CAR before co-founding Collision Equipment Experts in 2009.

“This company wants to represent the best, and I really feel Chief is the leader in the industry for holding, anchoring, pulling and measuring equipment,” said Putney. “And we are the best in our area in customer service – from body shop design and layout, to spec’ing the proper equipment for a customer’s application, to providing the service and training to help them reduce costs and improve their productivity.”

“We are really pleased to bring these two fine companies into the Chief distributor family,” said Bob Holland, director of collision sales in North and South America. “They are the kind of organizations you want on your front line. Because when it comes to total structural repair solutions – equipment, installation, training, vehicle repair data, technical support and plain no-nonsense advice – our distributor family is the embodiment of Chief to our end users.”