Menard, Inc.

Menard, Inc. — Company Profile

Overview. Menard, Inc. is the privately held parent of Menards, the third-largest U.S. home-improvement retail chain behind The Home Depot and Lowe's. It is headquartered at 5101 Menard Drive, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and was founded in 1958 by John Menard Jr., who remains majority owner; the company has no public ticker and is described as family-owned. Forbes and Owler estimate roughly 45,000 employees and about $13.4 billion in revenue, though as a private company Menard does not publish audited financials and these figures are third-party estimates.

Products / operations. Menards operates roughly 300–350 big-box home-improvement stores across about 15 Midwestern states (including Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas). Stores sell lumber and building materials, hardware, tools, paint, electrical and plumbing supplies, appliances, flooring, and lawn-and-garden goods. The company is vertically integrated to a degree, with in-house manufacturing and distribution operations, and Forbes notes involvement in residential real-estate development (subdivisions in Indiana and Illinois). It is unambiguously an operating retailer, not a patent-assertion entity.

Patent-litigation posture. The structured data shows Menard as a defendant in its only tracked case and never as a plaintiff — the profile of an operating company being sued rather than an entity asserting patents. The single tracked matter, Belwith Products, LLC v. Menard, Inc. (No. 1:26-cv-01400, W.D. Mich., filed April 29, 2026), is a patent-infringement action (35 U.S.C. § 271). The Western District of Michigan is not a plaintiff-friendly patent venue; it is where the Michigan-based plaintiff and the parties' earlier dispute were already located.

Context. The patent suit follows a long supplier relationship: Belwith, a Michigan cabinet-hardware maker, supplied decorative hardware and display cabinets to Menards from 2010 to 2021 under Vendor Compliance Program Letters. That relationship ended in litigation — Belwith Products, LLC v. Menard, Inc., No. 1:22-cv-00335 (W.D. Mich.), a diversity breach-of-contract and conversion case in which an August 2025 opinion resolved ownership of the display cabinets and left several claims for trial. Public records do not yet identify the specific patents asserted in the 2026 case.