Category Five Technologies Surpasses $158 Million in Cumulative Sales
The Livonia ecommerce company marks the milestone 23 years after a $76 online sale helped launch the family-owned
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The Livonia ecommerce company marks the milestone 23 years after a $76 online sale helped launch the family-owned business.
LIVONIA, MI, UNITED STATES, September 10, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Category Five Technologies, Inc., a family-owned ecommerce company specializing in commercial building products, announced that it has surpassed $158 million in cumulative sales since its founding in 2003.
The milestone comes 23 years after founder and CEO Anthony DiCicco began experimenting with ecommerce while working full time as a software developer. One of his first online transactions was the $76 sale of a World War I-era German bayonet that had belonged to his great-grandfather.
“I still think about it and wonder how a $76 sword started all of this,” DiCicco said.
Category Five Technologies was originally incorporated as a software consulting business. DiCicco’s early ecommerce experiments eventually led him to commercial hand dryers after his mother, Brenda, who worked for Livonia hand dryer manufacturer American Dryer, asked whether he would try selling the company’s products online.
The hand dryers sold, revealing an opportunity in a specialized commercial market. Using his software development background, DiCicco built ProDryers.com himself from his parents’ basement. He later built ProDrinkingFountains.com, creating a second ecommerce business focused on commercial drinking fountains, bottle filling stations and related hydration products.
Those specialized ecommerce businesses became the foundation for Category Five Technologies’ growth.
As sales increased, the DiCicco family basement filled with inventory. DiCicco, his wife Julie and his aunt Teresa worked at desks surrounded by boxed hand dryers. Packages were prepared in the basement and carried upstairs for daily pickup, while larger inventory shipments sometimes arrived by semi-truck at the family’s home.
Growth eventually moved the operation out of the basement and into commercial warehouse space in Livonia. DiCicco’s mother became Category Five’s first full-time employee. Julie later left an accounting career of more than a decade to join the company, and DiCicco’s sister, Tahnee, joined the business when it moved into warehouse space and remains its operations manager today.
Category Five’s growth has previously received national and regional recognition. In 2014, the company recorded $9.2 million in annual sales and ranked No. 682 nationally on the Inc. 500/5000 and No. 10 among the fastest-growing privately held companies in Metro Detroit. The following year, Henry Ford College reported that Category Five had surpassed $10 million in annual sales.
Today, Category Five operates approximately 10,000 square feet of warehouse space in Livonia and continues to develop its ecommerce operations around ProDryers.com and ProDrinkingFountains.com.
Technology also remains central to the company. Category Five now uses artificial intelligence in areas of its ecommerce and customer-service operations, while maintaining access to human staff when customers require additional assistance.
“We really see ourselves as an ecommerce company,” DiCicco said. “ProDryers became our first major ecommerce success, and ProDrinkingFountains showed us that the model could work in another specialized commercial market. Category Five is becoming the hub that brings it all together.”
DiCicco said the company expects to continue developing specialized ecommerce businesses and expanding the role of Category Five Technologies as the parent company connecting those operations.
“I don’t have an end date in mind,” he said. “I just want to keep building.”
The bayonet that helped start the company’s ecommerce journey is no longer in the family’s possession, but DiCicco still thinks about recovering it.
“I would pay good money to have that bayonet back,” DiCicco said. “I’ve always wondered what my great-grandfather would think about what happened after I sold it.”
If it ever returned, DiCicco said it would have a prominent place at Category Five.
“I’d put it right at the front of our office,” he said. “I’d want everyone who walked in to see it and remember how we got here.”
Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Livonia, Michigan, Category Five Technologies, Inc. is a family-owned ecommerce company specializing in commercial building products. Category Five operates ProDryers.com, a national supplier of commercial hand dryers and restroom equipment, and ProDrinkingFountains.com, a national supplier of commercial drinking fountains, bottle filling stations and related hydration products. Since its founding, Category Five Technologies has generated more than $158 million in cumulative sales.
Anthony DiCicco
Category Five Technologies, Inc.
+1 888-503-7937
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