The National Fastener Distributors Association named Kevin Queenin as the 2019 recipient of its Fastener Professional of the Year award.

In 1982 Queenin began his fastener career at Specialty Bolt & Screw as vice president and general manager. He and his sons, Jay and Jon, eventually purchased SBS and began a national and international expansion program to meet the requirements of the customer base. Today Massachusetts-based SBS has three distribution centers in the U.S. and three in Mexico, along with facilities in Canada, Finland and Taiwan.

Through technology, customer service, product quality and customer engineering support, SBS now provides inventory management of C commodities. Web: SpecialtyBolt.com

In 1991, Queenin was a co-founder of the iPower Distribution Group. The mission of iPower is to design, implement and manage supply chain solutions for C commodities and high value components for large OEMs.

Queenin is a founding member of the Global Supply Alliance.

He holds a bachelors from Westfield State University, where Queenin has been on the board and currently chairs the university’s foundation. Queenin also has been on the Noble Hospital board and volunteers multiple western Massachusetts civic organizations.

He was on the New England Fastener Distributors Association board from 1994-1996 and NFDA board from 1996-1999. For NFDA he served on the membership committee, chaired the Information & Technology committee and represented the NFDA on the Fastener Quality Act coalition.

The Fastener Professional of the Year award was created to honor individuals and companies. The inaugural award in 2017 was to Robbie Gilchrist of Capital Marketing and Jim Ruetz of AIS was honored last year. 

In nominating Queenin, Ruetz described him as “a mentor and friend to me for the last 25 years. His selfless desire to help anyone in the industry is reason enough alone for Kevin to be selected. Adding the fact that he has taken a small $1 million company to an international firm with sales in excess of $50 million.”

Queenin will be recognized at the NFDA Executive Summit on November 3-5 at the Ritz-Carlton Beach Resort in Naples, FL.

Nominations for the next Fastener Professional of the Year award will open in January 2020. Web: nfda-fastener.org