Oldcastle Glass Unveils New Name
June 1, 2010

As of today, Oldcastle Glass officially has a new name. It became Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope™ at midnight.

According to Ted Hathaway, chief executive officer of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based supplier, the company had become "boxed in" by a name that didn't indicate the full breadth of its product offering.

"For many years we were functioning as Oldcastle Glass but really, since 2003 when we bought our first architectural glazing business, Southwest Aluminum Systems, we've been migrating into a building envelope provider," Hathaway said in an exclusive interview with USGNN.com™/USGlass magazine today.

The new name is intended to better brand the company as a one-stop supplier of a range of glass- and metal-related products.

Ted Hathaway, CEO of Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope, says the company's new name is intended to better clarify its overall mission.

"We'd go to AIA Conventions and hold symposiums and people would say 'oh, I didn't know you did curtainwall, I didn't know you did skylights,' etc., so finally we realized we needed to address it," Hathaway said.

Susan Trimble, director of corporate communications, said company officials began considering the change well over a year ago.

"We looked at a lot of different possibilities … we went through a long process of about two to three months trying to find something that we felt was appropriate," Trimble said. Maintaining the Oldcastle name was an important part of the search. "We didn't want to have an unrelated name," Trimble added.

According to Hathaway, the tagline best defines the company's shift. "We started out with 'where glass becomes architecture' and that evolved into 'pushing the building envelope' and now it's 'engineering your creativity,' which is really who we are," he said.

He added, "We wanted to differentiate ourselves. Viracon says it's 'the leader in glass fabrication.' We wanted to set our sights higher, and so now our tagline is 'engineering your creativity.'"

The new name is intended to reflect the company's shift toward integrated project delivery (CLICK HERE to read related story on page 28 of the February USGlass).

"Parts and pieces are a thing of the past, design-bid-build has proven to be less than efficient. Integrated project delivery certainly has real potential," Hathaway said. "Whether working with an owner, an architect or a general contractor, we have a full understanding of design and integration. We're not just making commercial windows that go into someone else's curtainwall, we're not fabricating glass for someone else's window."

Hathaway discounted the idea that the name change might be cause for concern among some contract glaziers. He said that the overall shift toward integrated project delivery is intended to help the company's core customer, the glazing contractor.

"Being a supplier of integrated building envelopes in no way has an adverse impact on our customers; in fact, it helps our customers. If we speak to those customers that buy from different people, they run into problems of accountability and reliability. If you ask a glazing contractor how it manages, it's a task for them," Hathaway said. "When you source different products on a project and you have a schedule problem or a quality problem everybody suffers.

"Our preference is always to be supply-only and to work in partnership with contract glaziers," he added.

Hathaway explained, ""We do [the installation on] roughly 6-10 projects per year which are large, monumental project but the lion's share of the installation is done by our customers. And those customers are looking for companies that have financial stability. How many [suppliers] have filed for bankruptcy. How many are teetering? We have stability."

Trimble noted that in addition to sending a message to architects, building owners and glazing contractors, the new name also is intended to help unify employees across divisions.

Trimble noted that in addition to sending a message to architects, building owners and glazing contractors, the new name also is intended to help unify employees across divisions.

She said that the company began notifying employees of the potential change in mid-May with an email blast, followed by brochures, samples of business cards and letterhead. Those visuals were supplemented with items such as logo baseball caps for all employees and hardhats for those who needed them. "The idea was to give them a visual," Trimble said.

Hathaway notes that feedback from the company's sales organizations has been positive.

"From an external perspective, it clarifies what we do and who we are and from an internal perspective, it gives everyone across the full spectrum of acquisitions from glass fabricators to curtainwall engineering companies, a common point of unification," Hathaway said. "Everybody now understands the mission and the mission is now that we are the leading supplier of building envelope solutions in North America."

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