Belwith Products, LLC

Belwith Products, LLC is a privately held decorative- and functional-hardware company headquartered at 3100 Broadway Ave. SW, Grandville, Michigan. Its roots trace to the Keeler Brass Company, a Michigan foundry founded in 1893; the current LLC was formed by former Hickory Hardware management and acquired the Hickory Hardware decorative, door and security product assets from Melrose plc (Woodworking Network; Houzz). It is not publicly traded and reports no outside funding. Ownership sits under the Keeler Brass Company holding entity, which announced a brand realignment in 2026; John Veleris is chairman/CEO and Jason Chau is president (BusinessWire; Kitchen & Bath Business). Size estimates from third-party aggregators vary widely — roughly 50–250 employees and revenue bands from ~$13M to ~$37M — so no single figure is reliable; the company does not publish financials.

Products / operations. Belwith designs and markets cabinet, furniture, door and bath hardware — knobs, pulls, drawer slides, and related decorative and functional hardware — for retail, distribution, showroom and OEM channels in the U.S. and Canada. Its brand portfolio includes Belwith / Belwith-Keeler (design-forward decorative hardware), Keeler (luxury brass and bronze hardware), Hickory Hardware (retail/value cabinet and door hardware), and First Watch Security (home and commercial security products, marketed since 1959). It assembles some Keeler Brass lines to order in the U.S. It is an operating company, not a patent assertion entity.

Litigation posture. The tracked data show a single case, with Belwith as plaintiff and zero as defendant — an operating company asserting its own patents, not an NPE asserting an acquired portfolio. The suit is Belwith Products, LLC v. Menard, Inc., filed 2026-04-29 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan (No. 1:26-cv-01400), pleaded as patent infringement under 35 U.S.C. § 271.

Context. The patent suit follows an earlier breach-of-contract dispute between the same parties (No. 1:22-cv-00335) over the wind-down of an exclusive supplier agreement that expired in 2021, involving deductions, late fees, unpaid product invoices, and ownership of in-store display cabinets. The 2026 filing reflects a supplier relationship that has expanded into intellectual-property claims; specific asserted patents were not detailed in the available record. Venue is the parties' home district, not a plaintiff-friendly NPE forum such as the Eastern District of Texas.