The short answer to that question: a bunch of hardcore, dedicated folks who could be your neighbors.
DECKED products are drawn up in Ketchum, Idaho, and built in Defiance, Ohio, by a triple-digit crew who mostly drive trucks themselves. Engineers, machine operators, assemblers, quality techs, customer experience specialists, and sales reps who live out of their center consoles. Every Drawer System passes through dozens of hands before it lands in your truck bed.
If you want the long answer, here's who those hands belong to.
Designed by People Who Actually Use Trucks
DECKED started in 2014 with a sketch on a bar napkin in Ketchum, Idaho. The first prototypes were plywood. And while we hold massive respect for the venerable DIY truck drawer, those prototypes ended up in a bonfire, which tells you how that went.
The design and engineering crew still works out of Ketchum, but on nicer paper these days. This is a place where a pickup is a daily tool: ranching, farming, hauling firewood, chasing elk, or rambling down a washboard road loaded with enough kids, dogs, and fishing gear that you’re riding on the bump-stops. The point is, when you’re testing every day just by living life, you find the flaws in your own design fast. A 1/8-inch miss doesn’t reveal itself in a spec review the same way it does when you’re 45 minutes from home with zero cell reception.
And so the work goes: draw it, build it, load it, abuse it, break it, fix it. Drawers get cycled until the details shake out. Literally. Systems get loaded past the 2,000-lb top-deck rating to find out where the real limit sits. Fitment gets checked truck by truck, bed by bed, because a full-size F-150 and a midsize Tacoma have very little in common besides four wheels and a bed.
The second-generation Drawer System exists not because the first one wasn't good. It was. It just wasn’t good enough for the people who designed it.
ADAM Z.
“Once we have some functional models built, we get right to testing in-house. This can mean anything from max load tests, drop and impact, weatherproofness, and more.”
Built in Defiance, Ohio
We’ve built 365,000 sq ft of manufacturing space right here in the USA — affectionately known as the Badass Manufacturing Facility or BAMF — and that number continues to climb.
After endless hours on a computer screen, after prototypes have been put through their paces, it’s our equally badass manufacturing team that turns it all into something real.
The team runs the presses, the molds, and some of the most sophisticated machinery in the business, then checks the work before it leaves. Quality control isn't a department that shows up at the end. It's built into every single step, because a tool that's out of tolerance by a hair becomes a Drawer that could spoil a customer's day.
A lot of the crew has been at it for years. They instantly know the look of a bad part coming off the line, and nobody needs a memo to flag it.
Kelly W.
“We have a job to get done ... If you see someone that is maybe having a day, they’re struggling, you just jump in and you help them out.”
Defiance is a working town. People here haul feed, pull boats, run fence line, and put real miles on trucks that are tools first and nothing else second.
Walk the lot at shift change and you'll see it. Mud to the rocker panels, ladder racks, hitch balls well-polished from constant use, and DECKED Systems in the beds of the people who built them. Come spring, half the crew is standing along the Maumee before sunrise to cast a line before clocking in.
That's a feedback loop you can't buy, from good folks who believe in their own work. When somebody on the line says a latch is a pain to work with gloves on in February, that's not a note from a focus group. That's a guy who fought with it Tuesday morning in his own truck, in his own driveway, in the dark.
The People Who Answer the Phone
Despite our best efforts to get it right the first time, sometimes things go sideways. Products fail. Bolts go missing. A truck gets totaled and someone who just had a sh*t day is looking for a little ray of light. That's the job. They’re that ray of light.
These are real people in Ketchum, Idaho, who know the products because they've installed them and used them. Call in and you get someone who can tell you which hardware bag you're missing, why your Drawer isn't latching, and what actually fits your 2019 long-bed.
Hanna B.
“The thing I love about CX is getting to build real relationships. Customers become kind of like friends, all starting with a single phone call.”
The Customer Experience Team is our gateway to the customer: every issue, complaint, or guy who just wants to sing our praises comes through their headsets and inboxes. What do they do with that wealth of information?
Conveniently, they work right next door to our Product Team. They identify issues that evolve into trends and pass the info along to the people who can put it into action. They’re where the No BS Warranty gets to flex: If something isn't right, they make it right for the customer they’re helping and future customers alike.
No AI. No phone tree testing your swear-word vocabulary.
The Ones You Meet on the Road
Some of the team is rarely in a building at all. Sales Reps run routes out of their trucks, working with dealers and installers across the country, showing the product the only way that really does it justice: open the tailgate, pull the Drawer, let somebody put their hands on it.
When they hear the same question at ten stops in a row, it goes back to Ketchum and Defiance. Field feedback has changed hardware, packaging, and instructions more than once.
Blake D.
“QC doesn't stop when a product leaves Defiance. We found a packaging problem with one of our Cases, chased down why, and had Ohio on it same-day. That's the job: catch it, fix it, make it right.”
Why We Publish Everybody's Bio
Most companies list the executives and stop there. We post as much of the roster as we can. They’re 50% hype-up, 50% roast, and no one is safe.
Why? It’s pretty simple: nothing is built by a brand. It's all made possible by a person who ran the line that morning, a person who drew the bracket, and a person who picked up when you called. You should meet them.
The dog count is also public and runs about 1.5 per employee.