Company Coatings & Consumer Brands
The Old Name on the Can Just Went Independent
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.
For most of the last century, if you bought a can of Pittsburgh Paints, you were buying from a division of a very large chemicals company. As of December 2024, that stopped being true. In a deal worth $550 million, the private equity firm American Industrial Partners bought PPG's entire U.S. and Canada architectural coatings business and gave it back a name it had not owned outright in decades: The Pittsburgh Paints Company.
The result is one of the stranger stories in home improvement. This is not a startup. It is a top-three North American paint maker with roughly 750 company-owned stores, nine manufacturing plants, and a brand shelf most homeowners already recognize - Glidden, Olympic, Liquid Nails, PPG Paints, and the namesake Pittsburgh Paints & Stains. What is new is the corporate structure around all of it, and the pressure that comes with standing on its own.
A paint aisle, spun out of a giant
PPG Industries is a $16-billion-a-year coatings company, and for years its architectural paints in North America were only one line in a much bigger story that also includes automotive, aerospace, and industrial coatings. In October 2024, PPG announced it would sell that architectural business in the U.S. and Canada. On December 2, 2024, the sale closed, and the business was renamed The Pittsburgh Paints Company. PPG kept its international architectural business and everything else.
The buyer, American Industrial Partners, is an industrial-focused private equity firm managing around $17 billion. Carve-outs like this are its specialty - taking a division that a conglomerate treats as non-core and running it as a standalone company with its own leadership, its own budget, and its own reasons to move quickly. The Pittsburgh Paints Company kept its headquarters in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes northeast of downtown Pittsburgh.
One roof, a lot of familiar cans
The reason the company matters is the brand portfolio, not the corporate structure. Walk any paint department in North America and you are likely standing in front of its products without knowing they share a parent. Glidden is the mass-market interior and exterior line. Olympic covers wood stains for decks and fences. Liquid Nails is the construction adhesive that has been holding trim and paneling together for generations. Pittsburgh Paints & Stains, the namesake line, is sold exclusively at Menards across the Midwest. PPG Paints anchors the professional side, sold through the company's own stores, independent dealers, and Home Depot.
That spread is the whole strategy. The company sells to two very different customers at once. On one side are professional contractors who buy in volume, care about coverage and durability, and want a store that knows their name. On the other are DIY homeowners standing in a big-box aisle on a Saturday, choosing between a few dozen whites. Running both channels - roughly 750 owned stores plus shelf space at Home Depot, Menards, Lowe's, and HD Supply - is expensive and complicated, and it is also the moat. A pure online paint brand cannot tint a gallon at a counter in twenty minutes.
The rebrandKeeping the "Drippy P"
New independence usually means a new logo, and in April 2025 the company obliged - but carefully. It unveiled a refreshed mark and a new tagline, "Priming you for success," timed to a 150-year heritage that traces back to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company's paint sideline in the late 1890s. Crucially, the redesign kept the beloved "Drippy P," the paint-drip logo customers already associate with the brand. Heritage is the asset here; erasing it would have thrown away the one thing a 150-year-old name has that a newcomer does not.
The marketing calendar tells you how a heritage brand fights for attention. In August 2025 the company named "Warm Mahogany," a rich, warm red, its 2026 Color of the Year - the annual ritual that gets a paint company into design coverage and onto mood boards. It is a small thing that does a lot of work: one paint chip becomes a reason for magazines, designers, and homeowners to say the company's name.
A rich red the company describes as both dynamic and refined - a bet that people want warmth and connection back in their rooms.
It paints the Magic Kingdom
One of the more charming facts about the company is that it is an official paint provider for Disney parks. In 2025 it turned that relationship into a retail moment, building Glidden and PPG Paints displays around Disney's Lilo & Stitch and reportedly using its products on the film's set, including Stitch's spaceship. For a category as unglamorous as wall paint, borrowing a little of Disney's shine is a smart, low-cost way to stand out in an aisle where most cans look the same.
How it actually makes money
Strip away the branding and the model is straightforward: manufacture paint, stains, adhesives, and protective coatings at scale, then sell them through as many doors as possible. Revenue comes from both B2B and B2C - contractors and commercial jobs on one end, homeowners on the other. The company reports roughly $1.9 billion in annual sales, which lands it at No. 7 on the 2026 PCI 25 ranking of the world's largest coatings makers, with an estimated workforce in the thousands across North America.
In June 2026 it extended beyond the paint aisle, launching Pittsburgh Paints Protective Coatings - the industrial, high-performance line positioned as the new face of PPG's former high-performance coatings, starting with an exterior building-renewal product. That move signals where an independent company can push: past the crowded consumer shelf and into higher-margin industrial and commercial work.
The competitionFamiliar rivals, a familiar aisle
The company is not walking into an empty market. Sherwin-Williams towers over the professional channel. Behr owns prime shelf space inside Home Depot. Benjamin Moore holds the premium designer niche. And PPG, the former parent, still sells paint internationally. Against that field, the pitch for The Pittsburgh Paints Company is focus: a smaller, standalone company that only sells coatings, with a heritage name and a store network, can in theory make decisions faster than a division buried inside a chemicals conglomerate ever could.
The first year of independence was not tidy. The company cycled through leadership quickly, naming Brian Carson - a veteran of building products and flooring - as CEO in February 2025 after two earlier leaders. Standing up finance, IT, and operations that used to run on a parent company's systems is genuinely hard work, and the churn is a reminder that a carve-out is a construction project as much as a brand.
The timelineFrom plate glass to independence
Pittsburgh Plate Glass begins marketing durable architectural paints - the origin of the name.
PPG announces the sale of its U.S. and Canada architectural coatings business to American Industrial Partners.
The $550 million acquisition completes and The Pittsburgh Paints Company is formed.
Brian Carson named CEO in February; a refreshed logo and "Priming you for success" tagline follow in April.
A Lilo & Stitch collaboration in May; "Warm Mahogany" named 2026 Color of the Year in August.
Lands at No. 7 on the PCI 25 and launches its Protective Coatings line.
Why the boring story is the interesting one
Nobody launches a paint company in 2025. The Pittsburgh Paints Company did something harder: it relaunched a 150-year-old one. The bet is that a familiar can, a stable of brands people already trust, and a store on the corner still beat novelty in a category where a bad gallon means repainting a room. Whether an independent operator can out-focus its much larger rivals is the open question. For now, the old name is back on its own - and it has a lot to prove, one wall at a time.