Why Ryobi Was Forced To Stop Selling Garage Door Openers

It's pretty clear when you're browsing the shelves of your local Home Depot that Ryobi makes many different products. The company has its own version of nearly every power tool and major electrical or motorized appliance in the store. As the retailer's associate brand, Ryobi typically aims to offer affordable alternatives that favor value-per-dollar over top-tier performance. But one thing you might notice is that the brand no longer sells garage door openers.

Powered garage door openers are a fairly common household appliance. They're the exact sort of thing that you would expect a major tool company to manufacture since it makes so many of the other products that live in your garage — you would be right. There was a time when it did. You might even still be able to find leftover stock listed under the Ryobi name from retailers like Amazon, but every model that the manufacturer made is currently listed as "discontinued" on the official Ryobi website. So why might this be? It's not that the door openers weren't selling. Those who own these door openers can also rest easy in the knowledge that these products weren't discontinued for being faulty or having safety issues. Ryobi's parent company, Techtronic Industries, and Ryobi itself, actually lost a legal battle, which forced the company to stop selling them.

The Chamberlain Group is an umbrella corporation. It owns Chamberlain, LiftMaster, MyQ, Merlin, and several other companies that specialize in both residential and industrial automatic door operation technologies. It seems that several of the technologies that were baked into the Ryobi garage door opener models were lifted from those developed by one of The Chamberlain Group's subsidiaries. The Chamberlain Group, as a result, filed a suit against Techtronic Industries and Ryobi for willfully infringing on two of its patents: U.S. Patent Nos. 7,224,275 and 7,635,966. The first of these is a wireless status condition transmitter that monitors and transmits information about the garage door to the remote. The second is a system for using an emergency backup battery and related charging center to power the door opener in the event of a power outage.

On Aug. 30, 2017, the court ruled in The Chamberlain Group's favor.

So what were the ramifications for Ryobi, and will we be seeing garage door openers from the brand in the future? According to a report from Winston & Strawn, on May 23, 2018, "the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois granted CGI's request for a permanent injunction blocking the sale of Ryobi's connected garage door openers (models GD200 and GD200A) and similar garage door openers until 2023." This means that Ryobi's two previous models were permanently banned from sale and that it could not release any new, similar models until after 2023. On top of that, Ryobi was also forced to pay over $11 million in damages as well as legal costs to The Chamberlain Group.

The timer is long since up on the court's ban on Ryobi door openers, so we may yet see the brand manufacture new products. That said, Ryobi has released several new tools in 2024 and there has been no mention of another line of garage door openers. It may simply be that R&D takes time, but Ryobi may also be reluctant to dip back into that particular product line again after getting its hand caught in the proverbial cookie jar.