As ongoing economic uncertainty remains our reality, it’s no secret that sectors like manufacturing and chemicals – amidst a growing list of others – remain under pressure. In business environments like today, it’s important that leaders and businesses are strategic, agile enough to adapt, forward thinking and moving, and optimistic. As a former competitive athlete, I could say we must do whatever it takes to keep moving the ball downfield.   

We talk regularly as a team about the importance of controlling what we can. During a recent employee town hall, we highlighted inspiring examples of how we are keeping our six core values in focus and advancing in impactful ways related to environmental health and safety, our employees, continuous improvement, corporate social responsibility and customer excellence. Despite market challenges, we have improved our safety performance, begun implementing employee involvement committees at sites worldwide to promote our culture, forged ahead with our integration activities, finalized our near-term growth strategy, and continued investing in innovative technologies and projects.

I am often asked what I’m most excited about related to our company’s future. Without hesitation, two words come to mind; words we’ve used often since our legacy organizations became Vibrantz: Better together. As one company, Vibrantz now has core competencies in particle engineering, material science and color technology, and we’ve used our expertise platform powerfully over the last year plus to positively impact customers all over the world.  

This month, the blog features inspiring examples across our three business units of how coming together has amplified our ability to embrace our core commitment to customer excellence.

Perhaps one of the more obvious ways Vibrantz is now able to benefit customers is through our expanded advanced materials, color solutions and performance coatings offerings. Our July 2023 blog featuring Vibrantz’s play in automotive is a perfect example. Automotive equipment manufacturers who may have previously only used our automotive polishing for exteriors, now have access to our advanced technologies for batteries, our metallic and protective pigments and colorants, and more.

Being the larger company we are today and having a broader global reach doesn’t mean we’ve lost sight of what we do best, which is being uniquely positioned to help customers solve their toughest challenges. Day in and day out, I watch our talented, creative and incredibly dedicated employees partner with customers to ensure they get unique, high-performing solutions tailored to their exacting specifications. Take, for example, our custom engobes and glazes for bricks. As builders and homeowners desire an increasing variety of color and performance options in home materials, our customers must keep pace. And for the last 100 years, Vibrantz has been alongside our customers manufacturing products that improve the quality, vividness and color retention of bricks.

If you’re a customer, you likely interact with a Vibrantz team member and understand their impact on our ability to serve you. We thank you for your partnership and the continued opportunity to serve you. If you’re a Vibrantz employee, I am grateful for you. Our 5,000 colleagues around the world are why we are better for each other and customers. Your expertise, agility and optimism are the momentum helping us find certainty in today’s world. Here’s to moving the ball downfield…together.

You’ve heard us say often that Vibrantz is on an incredible journey. A journey to build an enduring and sustainable world-class specialty chemicals and materials company that our employees believe is a safe and great workplace, makes a favorable impact on the planet and creates value for stakeholders. 

We haven’t plugged our destination coordinates into a mapping app or given the address to a ride share driver as we sit idly waiting to get to the other side. On the contrary, the Vibrantz experience just over one year in is an exciting road trip where – day in and day out – our leaders and 5,000 employees are hyper focused on the steps required to keep serving our 11,000 customers while integrating, innovating and navigating today’s dynamic economic landscape. 

It’s fitting, then, that this month our blog stories focus on Vibrantz’s impact in automotive applications. In other words, we’re featuring just a few of the ways that our journey is positively impacting yours.

Weekly, the media is awash with stories featuring transportation trends. Regardless of the extent and rate at which cars and trucks are electrified, automated or used as a service, getting from point A to B in a private vehicle is something the world is rather attached to. According to Statista, private vehicle travel today is preferred by almost two times that of public transport.

It’s easy to assume the role of a chemicals and materials company in the automotive space is solely in the raw input materials used to make vehicle batteries. But for decades, Vibrantz’s advanced materials, color solutions and performance coatings have played a leading role in making vehicles safer, stand-out, more efficient and – also critical – that support the global shift to produce greener cars and trucks. Whether it’s our abrasives for brake pads, frits and glazes for taillight sensors, tanning agents, colorants and pigments for vehicle interiors, or glass enamels for windshields – Vibrantz scientists obsess over daily commute details so drivers don’t have to.

But that’s not even the best part. Our manufacturing employees also take great pride in being an important part of the vehicles driving on roads worldwide. When asked about his work at our Villagran, Mexico, facility, Guadalupe Garcia, an R&D pigments chemist said:

“I love working on products like our reflective pigments that enable cooler surfaces on cars. We really are working on solving the biggest challenges and demands of today’s market.”

Cuauhtemoc Rosas, the glass plant manager in Villagran, also shared:

“The Vibrantz purpose, vision and values – particularly safety – guide our behavior and are manifested in the products we make. Like the automotive pastes that enable windshield safety. It’s awesome seeing how our efforts are part the bigger team bringing these solutions to life.”

And while we’re proud of our impact on vehicles to date, our sights are also set further down the highway as the landscape evolves to include more hybrid and electric vehicles (EVs). We recently announced the construction of a pilot project that will process high-purity manganese sulfate (HPMSM) used in batteries as original equipment manufacturers prioritize the production of zero-emission vehicles. Over the next three years, this expansion is anticipated to increase our HPMSM capacity to a level that could help power two million EVs as we provide an additional manganese sulfate alternative for the battery market serving EVs.

If you’re not yet following us on LinkedIn or X, formerly known as Twitter, I invite you to do so. If you’d like to learn about the fascinating science helping elevate everyday products, subscribe to our Vibrantz Edge blog.

If nothing else, enjoy a little “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac as you commute and journey through this month’s stories with us. 

A place where employees feel empowered to be authentic, innovate and deliver significant value to customers and society. This is the culture we are building at Vibrantz Technologies. 

The challenge of bringing together three companies and three different cultures is something we continue to take seriously.  A recent McKinsey report stated that 25% of executives cite cultural misalignment as an integration concern. So how are we building a strong, shared culture that helps ensure Vibrantz thrives?

Our people are our why.

Our 5,000+ employees are our greatest strength. They are the why behind so much of what we do, like why we focus so strongly on developing, rewarding and retaining our employees and why we work together to ensure we’re bringing our core purpose to life each day. 

“We’re uniquely passionate about creating a highly engaged workforce,” said Imelda Torres-Laborde, executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Vibrantz. “This means we are committed to creating a workplace where our people come to work each day and can perform tasks that suit their skills and talents, but also that they can do work that challenges, inspires and brings them pride. If we can do this, we will succeed far beyond providing strong financial results.”

We’re uniquely passionate about creating a highly engaged workforce. This means we are committed to creating a workplace where our people come to work each day and can perform tasks that suit their skills and talents, but also that they can do work that challenges, inspires and brings them pride. If we can do this, we will succeed far beyond providing strong financial results.”

Programs built to leave a legacy. 

As we work toward our vision to become an enduring and sustainable organization, we envision a Vibrantz with our six core values – safety, commitment to customers, our people, sustainability and the environment, commitment to excellence and integrity, ethics and trust, – as part of the organization’s fabric. We have worked hard in our first year to begin building a collaborative environment and our sites have gone above and beyond in the commitment they’ve shown. In the past year our team has:

• Celebrated International Women’s Day with employees worldwide and focused on inclusion 
• Hosted a virtual 5K event for employees, neighbors and families to connect while being active
• Heard from over 90% of employees in our first employee feedback survey
• Continued to hear from over 200 employees directly via in-person focus groups worldwide
• Commemorated our one-year anniversary as Vibrantz
• Been recognized as the fifth most active chemical company on social media in the U.S. and 29th in the world

We aim to have our people feel valued, and we are in the business of improving their lives at work and in their communities. We have begun to measure and strengthen our workforce’s engagement and the investments we’re making to ensure employees’ safety, development and inclusion. Additionally, we are focusing on our sustainability efforts with a mission to ensure the vibrancy of our people, culture, communities and planet.  As part of these efforts, we have an employee-led council in place to help drive what it means for Vibrantz to be connected with our employee base by defining what it means to: 

• Be involved
• Have a voice and feel valued
• Belong to an organization that is diverse and inclusive
• Be a company that is sought after because we are an employer-of-choice

We expect to launch our first sustainability report in 2024, highlighting the work of our Corporate Social Responsibility Council whose efforts are rooted in the powerful shared belief that we are the best versions of ourselves when we are positively impacting others.