Unison Hardware

Unison Hardware was founded in Germany in 1991 as an OEM manufacturer of door hardware for the European architectural market — the unglamorous discipline of designing the lever, hinge, and lock that thousands of doors close on every day, to a tolerance the door-frame can be trusted with for thirty years. In 2005 the firm crossed the Atlantic and opened a US operation in Sacramento, California, under which it now sells two lines into the North American market: INOX for residential applications and Unison for commercial. Three manufacturing facilities in China supply both.

The firm designs and manufactures decorative architectural door hardware — stainless-steel lever sets, hinges, door closers, mortise locks, and the various ancillary fittings that follow them — in a quality and finish typically specified for premium residential, hospitality, healthcare, and commercial buildings. North American distribution runs through a network of architectural-hardware dealers; specifications appear in projects across the United States, Canada, the Gulf states, and Central and South America. The Sacramento operation handles design, marketing, distribution, and customer support for the North American market.

What distinguishes Unison Hardware in its sector is the combination of a European engineering register and a directly owned Asian manufacturing footprint. Many North American architectural-hardware brands operate as importers without manufacturing of their own, or as legacy domestic manufacturers whose tooling and finishes have not kept pace with the architectural fashion of the last twenty years; Unison sits between those poles, owning its three Chinese factories and continuing to design products against the European OEM standards that built the firm.

The practice has worked with Unison Hardware at the Sacramento operation on Lean process implementation across operations.