H. Gerstner & Sons was founded in 1906 in Dayton, Ohio, by Harry Gerstner, a man who had spent his formative years as a woodworking apprentice and pattern-maker, earning his craft one joint at a time. He made his first tool chest while working evenings after his day job, spending a full year designing and building it. A friend asked for one. Then another. Harry recognized that what he'd built was simply better than anything else on the market, and he staked his future on it: using a $100 apprenticeship bonus to start the company. His guiding principle from the start: "A place for everything and everything in its place."

By the close of World War I, a handful of American companies were producing wooden tool chests. By the mid-1960s, H. Gerstner & Sons was the last standing. They never pivoted, never cut corners to survive. The company has operated from the same Dayton location since 1913, and their chests can be found in virtually every quality metalworking shop from coast to coast. There's a reason for that longevity: the chests were built to outlast everything around them. Letters in the company archives from customers who bought chests in the 1920s confirm that many are still in daily use—passed between generations, occasionally sent back to Dayton for restoration, and returned to service.

What sets a Gerstner chest apart has nothing to do with ornament. It's the consequence of a century of decisions made in favor of quality: the right wood, the right hardware, the right proportions, assembled by people who understood that a chest built properly would outlast the workshop it lived in. We've been drawn to Gerstner since the beginning of Best Made for exactly this reason.