Forcine is an employee-owned (ESOP) concrete construction company, specializing in large-scale technical construction across industrial, commercial, cold storage, and capital improvement markets. The project centered on a complete rebrand and website redesign that needed to authentically represent Forcine's technical sophistication and craftsmanship, while navigating a major brand decision following the company's acquisition of R&W Shotcrete.
Project Overview
Forcine needed a brand visual identity and website experience that could carry the weight of a growing, increasingly sophisticated business; one that reflected its employee ownership, safety standards, and technical expertise without collapsing into generic "hard hat and crane" construction language. The project began with a deep discovery phase, a strategic workshop to determine how a newly acquired sub-brand should be positioned going forward, visual brand identity creation, and then a full UX/UI design and development build of the website itself.
Challenge
Forcine's existing brand didn't reflect where the company actually stood in the market. Forcine is technically sophisticated, trusted for complex problem-solving, and structurally different from competitors because of its employee ownership. Layered on top of that was a harder strategic question: Forcine had recently acquired R&W Shotcrete, a specialty concrete company, and needed to decide whether R&W would stay a separate brand, sit under Forcine as a sub-brand, or be fully folded in. Whatever we landed on also had to hold up structurally. The site's services and markets architecture needed room to grow without turning into a maze of fragmented sub-brand pages.
Favorite Bits //
These are the delightful moments of the project that make it special
(01) Brand Future Exploration: Deciding R&W 's Path Forward
After Forcine acquired R&W Shotcrete, the open question was how, or whether, to keep R&W as its own brand. To work through this decision alongside the client, I built a whiteboard workshop laying out three paths: separate brand, sub-brand under a parent structure, or full absorption. Each option came with pros/cons grounded in real evidence learned in discovery from stakeholder interviews and surveys, competitor analysis, and market research, not opinion.
The evidence pointed one way: R&W's brand equity was tied largely to individual relationships rather than the name itself. In addition, maintaining two brands would double the marketing load for a lean team and fragment SEO efforts. We recommended full absorption, which meant retiring the R&W name, folding its services into Forcine's own offerings, and preserving its history through a breadcrumb trail rather than a separate brand.
(02) Building an Architecture for Services and Markets
Before the site map could organize Forcine's offerings, we had to define them. I built a workshop exercise that plotted every service and specialty Forcine performs against two axes: how traditional or disruptive the approach is, and how mainstream or niche its market is. Mapping core services like flatwork, tilt-up, foundations, and site concrete against specialties like shotcrete, soil stabilization, underpinning, and concrete repair forced a real distinction between what belonged in Forcine's primary service taxonomy and what belonged in a separate specialties category.
03) Building With Foresight. Delivering With Force.
The tagline, Building with foresight. Delivering with force., became the anchor for Forcine's new brand positioning. Forcine's foresight is a deliberate skillset. It shows up in sequenced scheduling that optimizes the entire build timeline, accurate project estimates, and active problem-solving that anticipates challenges before they can touch a timeline or a budget. This foresight is matched by force: the strength, scale, and grit Forcine brings to execute at a high standard on every project.
