Twenty Years in Baling Wire and He Still Picks Up the Phone: Meet Andy Stokes, Vice President of Sales

There is a certain kind of person who ends up in the baling wire business and stays. Andy Stokes is one of them.

Andy joined Eastern Wire Products in 2019, but his history with baling wire goes back much further. He spent nearly a decade with Cavert Wire beginning in the mid-2000s, handling multiple large territories and learning the business the way it should be learned: account by account, plant by plant, load by load. When he stepped away in 2017 to sell corrugated boxes for a manufacturer in Indiana, he got a two-year look at packaging from the other side of the fence. Then wire called him back.

That combination, a deep bench of baling wire experience plus time spent in adjacent packaging, is a big part of what Andy brings to our customers. He understands that bale ties are not a commodity line item on a purchase order. They are part of a recycling operation that has to run every shift, every day, and a wire failure at the baler is not an inconvenience. It is downtime.

Steady hands in 2020 and 2021

Andy had been with Eastern Wire less than a year when COVID hit and the steel market went sideways.

Anyone who lived through that stretch remembers it. Scrap and steel availability tightened, prices climbed at a pace nobody in the industry had seen, and lead times became a moving target. Plenty of suppliers went quiet during that period. Andy did the opposite. He was on the phone with customers daily, walking them through pricing adjustments, explaining what was happening upstream in the steel market, and giving them real answers on availability instead of vague reassurance.

That work mattered. Customers who got straight information from us during 2020 and 2021 are still customers today. Some of the strongest relationships in our book were built in that window, not because the news was good, but because the communication was honest.

Growing into the role

As the market corrected and conditions stabilized, Andy's focus shifted toward our larger users, distributors, and corporate accounts. Those relationships require a different skill set: multi-location coordination, contract pricing, volume planning, and the patience to work through a corporate procurement process that can take months.

Today Andy serves as Vice President of Sales at Eastern Wire Products. It is a player-coach role, and that description is not a figure of speech. He leads our sales representatives and customer support team, sets the annual sales plan alongside the President, and builds our pricing strategy. He also carries his own territory and manages a portfolio of key house accounts personally.

In practice, that means the person setting sales strategy for Eastern Wire Products is the same person out riding along on field calls, working trade shows, and answering the phone when a customer has a problem. Strategy at this company is not written in a conference room by someone who has not been in a recycling facility lately.

Outside the business

Andy lives in Muncie, Indiana. When he is not working, he is usually with family in the North Carolina mountains or in Sarasota, Florida chasing 70 degrees.

Anyone who has spent an Indiana February can appreciate the strategy.

Get in touch

Whether you are running a single baler or coordinating bale tie supply across a dozen locations, Andy and the Eastern Wire Products sales team are ready to help you find the right product for your operation.

Connect with Andy