Star Metro - Gridko Wins Overall 2026 NATDA TRAILmakER Trophy in Its First Year Entering the Show

STATESVILLE, NC / ACCESS Newswire / September 11, 2026 / This year, Gridko entered the NATDA Trailer Show, one of the largest in the show's history, for the first time, and left with two awards, including the show's top honor.

"We did not just show up, we showed up and took home two awards," the Gridko team said.

Gridko has been named the Overall Trophy Recipient of the 2026 NATDA TRAILmakER Awards, the highest recognition given at the trailer industry's largest annual show. The distinction is decided in stages. NATDA first names a winner in each product category, then selects one of those winners to receive the Overall Trophy. This year's category winners were:

• Vehicle: RawMaxx
• Heavy Duty: Gridko LLC
• Livestock: Hillsboro Industries, Inc.
• Cargo/Concession: Celltech Trailers
• Utility: Bear Track Trailers

Gridko won the Heavy Duty category outright, then was selected for the Overall Trophy over the winners of Vehicle, Livestock, Cargo/Concession, and Utility, the only builder recognized twice at this year's show.

The trailer that earned both awards did not start as a show project. It started as a question inside Gridko's own operation. The company already runs a direct drive power take-off (PTO) on the hook lift and cable roll off truck side of its business, where it is standard, proven equipment operators rely on every day. A PTO draws mechanical power directly from a vehicle's engine or transmission to run auxiliary equipment, the same way heavy trucks in agriculture, utility, and vocational work have relied on it for years. Most trailers, by contrast, still move their hoist with an electric or hydraulic winch powered by the trailer's own battery or by a small auxiliary engine known as a pony motor, and both approaches share the same weakness: a winch that cannot handle the workload burns out, a battery drains after only a handful of heavy trips, and the common fix of bolting on a pony motor just adds another engine to maintain, another point of failure, and more cost over the life of the trailer. One of Gridko's owners looked at how reliably the PTO performed on the company's own trucks and asked why trailers were not built the same way. Nobody else building trailers had made that connection, in part because trailer manufacturing and truck equipment work tend to sit in separate corners of the industry. Gridko sits in both, and decided to be the company that closed that gap.

That decision reflects how Gridko approaches its work more broadly, and how the company built its team in the first place. Gridko recruited veteran engineers and tradespeople out of commercial trucking and heavy equipment work, people who brought years of hands-on experience with them rather than approaching trailer engineering from scratch. No other approach was ever seriously on the table. The goal from day one was to build something nobody else in the industry had built, which made it a better version than any existing trailer, and once that direction was set, the team committed to it fully. Trailer operators have lived for years with winches that fail under heavy workloads and batteries that die after a handful of trips, problems the industry has generally patched over rather than solved. Gridko set out to solve it instead, using engineering the company already trusted from its own truck fleet. The direct drive PTO trailer was the result, and Gridko is now building it for dealers and fleet operators who want the same system on their own equipment.

The work behind that trailer was a full team effort from top to bottom. Gridko's owners stayed hands on throughout the process. The company's head engineer led the design and build. The production team, welders, hydraulics technicians, and electricians, each had a defined role and executed it. When the trailer performed exactly as designed, there were no surprises left, just a team that knew what it had built and why.

"We did not build this trailer to win an award. We built it to solve a real problem for our customers. The award just confirmed we were on the right track," the Gridko team said.

By the team's own account, the full weight of what they had accomplished did not really land until they were standing on the show floor in Nashville. Seeing the trailer, the truck, and the complete setup, and watching as people stopped to look, was the moment the whole team was genuinely proud of. Dealers, builders, and judges all stopped and took notice, drawn to something in the trailer build that nobody at the show had seen before.

That reaction carried through to the awards themselves. Walking up to accept the Overall Trophy is, in the team's words, "the biggest trophy anyone at Gridko has ever been part of receiving." The moment brought together the late nights, the pressure, and the work that had gone into the build, and by the team's account, the joy of that moment moved through the entire company.

Winning the Heavy Duty category is a claim about one product line. Winning the Overall Trophy is a claim about the company behind it, since it means NATDA's judges rated Gridko's engineering above every other category's best entry, not just the trailers built for the same kind of heavy use. Gridko now carries both distinctions: Overall Trophy Recipient and Heavy Duty category winner.

Winning the show's top award in its first year of competing is the outcome Gridko says it built toward when it assembled its engineering and production staff, and the company is treating the win as validation to keep applying that same approach across its lineup rather than a one time result. Dealers and fleet operators interested in the award winning lineup can visit gridko.com to learn more.

About Gridko

Gridko designs and manufactures steel built roll off, gooseneck, and bumper pull trailers, along with Gridko cable hoists for roll off trucks, for dealers, dumpster rental companies, waste haulers, contractors, and fleet operators across the United States. The company built its team by recruiting veteran engineers and tradespeople from commercial trucking and heavy equipment work. American Built. Smarter by Design.

Media Contact
Gridko LLC
[email protected]
gridko.com
+1 447-247-4356

SOURCE: Gridko

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A.Desjardins--SMC