I got tired of driving to three places for one cable run.
Marcus Holt spent nine years as a site carpenter before opening Gearbox Tool Supply in 2017. The problem he kept running into was simple: local suppliers stocked the popular sizes and nothing else. You could get a 25mm spade bit or a 50mm spade bit, but the 32mm you actually needed for the cable run was a special order that took two weeks. He got tired of driving to three different places or waiting on slow freight, so he opened a shop that stocked the full range from the start.
The first location was a 600-square-foot unit on Millbrook Industrial Estate. Marcus ran it alone for the first eighteen months, ordering every Tuesday, packing every order himself, and closing Sundays. The turning point came in early 2019 when a local electrical contractor started ordering weekly and introduced Gearbox to four other contractors in the same building. That word-of-mouth cluster pushed stock turnover high enough to justify a second staff member and a proper inventory system. By 2021 the shop had moved to a larger unit two streets over and added the online catalog.
