Two brothers watched private equity buy their father's factory and shut it down. Their answer was to build a manufacturing group that ends with the employees owning the whole thing.
A 150-year-old paint name got its independence back in a $550 million deal. Now the company behind Glidden, Olympic and Liquid Nails has to prove a heritage brand can move fast.
Zirconia Inc. is a Tukwila, Washington advanced-materials company that turns the surface of concrete and steel into a skin of ceramic. Its flagship product, CeramycGuard, is a room-temperature nano-ceramic geopolymer coating - essentially liquid granite - that chemically bonds to concrete and steel to stop corrosion, seal porosity, and repair cracks. Rooted in a modernized version of Roman cement and two decades of university research, the company aims to make aging infrastructure sustainable, safer, and effectively immortal.