Above: Vorteq strives to provide customers with personalized service and product education
July, 2024- Humans tend to attach meaning to colors, and, according to the Interaction Design Foundation, people respond to color in three ways— biologically, culturally and based on their personal experience.
Designers can use this color symbolism in logos and other business communications to gain users’ trust and attention.
Vorteq, Pittsburgh, despite being a nationwide provider of coil coating services, knows that its regional employees often bleed black and gold or orange and blue, and the company has leaned into these alliances to retain the mom-and-pop, local-feeling roots of the brand.
“Our Pittsburgh plant is all black and gold, and our Chicago facilities have Cubs and Bears colors,” says CEO Jim Dockey. “We’ve tried to have a little bit of fun along the way, as well as identify each plant with its own differently colored logo.”
SHOWTIME
Vorteq recently acquired the California coil coating assets of Material Science Corp., bolstering its presence in the western United States. The facility is just a couple of miles down the highway from the Staples Center, says Dockey, making purple and gold the logical choices for the logo. “It helps us engage new employees with a common, uniting theme. The first thing some of the new employees asked was if they were going to get Vorteq gear in Lakers colors.”
The new facility will complement Vorteq’s Pacific operation in Rancho Cucamonga, nearly doubling capacity and providing broader capabilities in heavier gauge products, both steel and aluminum.
“We know that market very well, and we’ve always aspired to play a bigger role in it,” Dockey says. “The limitations on the capabilities of our line that we acquired back in 2019 only allowed us to do so much. Now, we can handle wider widths and heavier gauges, along with additional value-added secondary processing, operating essentially as one business unit.”
He points out that much more of the mix is going to be steel-focused, particularly for the architectural wall and roof panel business. “We’ve never had a line that could paint steel in the 43- to 45-inch-wide range. So that opens up an entire new market expansion opportunity. And then on the aluminum side, it gives us a more efficient way to serve the market by coating wider material and then slitting afterward.”
WIDESPREAD
This transaction is the sixth add-on acquisition for Vorteq in the last eight years and the third since 2022. With the new facility, the company will operate 11 continuous coil coating lines across North America.
“Our strategy going back to 2016 has been to expand through acquisition to increase geographical presence and reach to be able to supply customers throughout the whole United States and also increase our capabilities to serve different markets as we’ve grown,” says Dockey. “We’ve completed a footprint that extends from the East to the West Coast and north to south—from Wisconsin to Mexico City and Allentown, Pennsylvania, to Los Angeles. Over time, we’ve developed a strategy to find the right acquisition that complements our existing business model and then acquire and integrate it into the Vorteq way of doing things.”
Dockey says that every acquisition presents unique challenges, but the integration process for Vorteq is “pretty similar” every time—getting the business systems set up and engaging the new employees.
The MSC-LA acquisition will increase Vorteq’s capabilities across the Western United States.
“We’ve tried to make sure that the Vorteq culture, beyond painting metal, is part of how we welcome new businesses into the family— how we treat our employees, our customers, our suppliers and the way we do business,” Dockey says. Vorteq works to create a boutique service experience, including no color restrictions, multiple embossing patterns, expansive slitting capabilities and cut-to-length services.
Using regional team colors in the company logo helps unite employees
TEAMWORK
Co-located facilities is a model that Vorteq uses in the Midwest, with one line in Chicago, one in Woodstock, Illinois, and another near the Wisconsin state line. “That’s five coating lines in three facilities, each with a somewhat unique market focus and capabilities, but we try to operate them as our Midwest Vorteq business unit,” says Dockey. “It’s been very efficient for us and very effective for our customers.”
Vorteq’s goal is to replicate this model with the two West Coast units working closely together. “We have many customers that will paint at both locations,” Dockey says. “The top four or five MSC customers were also our customers at our facility down the road, but we didn’t have the capability before the acquisition to provide them with the full breadth of service” now available across two facilities.
“We also have a handful of national customers, and we want to be able to serve them at a high level, regardless of geography, allowing them to take advantage of our value and service while limiting legs of freight and cross-country shipments,” he continues. “With this new location, we will be able to expand our market participation while continuing to service our existing customers and national accounts with unparalleled service and quality.”
Vorteq Coil Finishers, vorteqcoil.com
