Paint Company Rolls Over Competition -- New Product Withstands Nasty Weather

Bill and Debra Brinton moved to Seattle for the lousy weather. Really.

It's a place where rain, fog and sometimes cold make it difficult to paint outdoors.

The Brintons moved here from sunny Marina del Rey, Calif., to start a paint-manufacturing business. If their product worked in the Northwest, they reasoned, it would work anywhere.

It worked.

Since the Brintons started business in a third-floor room overlooking the Kingdome 10 years ago, Wasser High-Tech Coatings has grown to become a leading manufacturer of high-performance industrial paints.

Last week, on a rainy day when weather would have shut down work using other paints, crews were busy painting the steel above the express lanes on the Ship Canal Bridge on Interstate 5.

Wasser paint is being applied to the Space Needle. It's on the largest hydroelectric dam in the Northeastern United States and on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland.

During the coming year, Wasser paint will be sprayed on the Seattle Mariners' stadium, New York's Manhattan Bridge and the King Fahd Causeway, which links Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The Brintons have their eye on markets they've barely begun to tap, including industrial plants and supertankers.

The company and its 60 employees fill a warehouse in Kent. Wasser's growth from a two-employee start-up to a company with annual sales of $25 million is testimony to the ability of an entrepreneur with a better product to take a healthy chunk of business away from blue-chip corporations.

Bill Brinton, 57, a chemist who worked for several paint companies, didn't invent the idea of a tough, ready-to-apply paint to replace epoxy coatings that had to be mixed on-site and didn't last if applied in poor weather. Rather, he improved on a promising but unrefined 35-year-old German technology.

"I'm dangerous because I'm a chemist, and I'm a good chemist," Brinton said.

It took him months to get his formula just right and years to convince engineering firms and painting contractors that the product was as good as he claimed.

Turned away by corporate executives unwilling to try a product from an unknown company, the Brintons turned to a grass-roots kind of guerrilla marketing. They visited lower-level engineers, including some in a Seattle city laboratory who asked if Wasser Coatings had paint that could be used on damp concrete at the Windermere sewage-storage station.

Bill Brinton replied that Wasser had just the paint for the purpose. He went back to the lab with a recipe in his mind, mixed a sample and delivered it to the city. He won an $80,000 city contract, which the Brintons met by using a paddle to stir the ingredients in a metal drum.

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wouldn't contract for Wasser paint, maintenance managers at the Ballard Locks used their petty cash account to buy $500 worth of it for testing purposes. That low-cost testing led to a contract.

Debra Brinton, meanwhile, talked chemical suppliers into extending credit "before we deserved it," as her husband put it. Contractors who liked the product helped the company by paying in advance.

Bill's sons, Bill Jr. and Bret, joined the company. The "Four Musketeers," as the Brintons called themselves, would sell paint during the day, mix chemicals at night, and sometimes play tennis until 1 in the morning.

Their first big break came when the Oregon Department of Transportation tested the paint on coastal bridges subject to severe weather and salt spray. Doug Eakin, the state structural coating coordinator, was astounded by the results.

Not only did the new paint allow contractors to meet deadlines unencumbered by bad weather, the quality of the finished paint was better than anything Eakin had seen. Wasser paint was used on Oregon's next big job and one of its most difficult: the Astoria Bridge.

When Eakin excitedly reported the results at a national convention, "they practically laughed themselves out of their chairs," he recalled.

"Everybody told me I was going to be real sorry about using this system," he said.

Nobody's laughing any more.

The very "gurus of the paint industry" who had ridiculed moisture-cure urethane paints are now among their biggest promoters, Eakin said. He remains impressed. Eight years after first using the Wasser paint on the coast, it's doing so well Eakin expects it to last for 20 or 30 years, two to three times longer than the older epoxy paints.

A few competitors are bringing out products designed to emulate Wasser paints, but so far they aren't up to Wasser quality, said Eakin and Gail Svoboda, whose Minnesota-based company, Abhe & Svoboda, is painting the Ship Canal Bridge.

Wasser has drawn unkind comments from some competitors' sales representatives, Brinton and Eakin said. When rumors circulated that the Kent company had filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code or was going out of business, Wasser circulated an advertisement saying it would not tolerate dirty tricks, misinformation and "clearly illegal" statements.

One competitor, Sherwin-Williams, responded to Wasser's success by offering to buy the company, Brinton said, an offer he turned down. For Sherwin-Williams, Wasser represented an opportunity to branch out from consumer paints to the market for high-performance industrial paints.

Industry leaders include Pasadena-based Ameron International, a public corporation with annual sales of $533 million, and Carboline, a $150 million St. Louis-based subsidiary of RPM.

Other companies could have produced a better high-performance industrial paint but didn't, Brinton said, largely because low-bid government contracts didn't offer any incentive for improved quality. A growing number of other agencies accept the more-expensive Wasser paints on grounds that they are high quality and help reduce total contract costs.

"I think we just got into an industry that was kind of complacent and divvied up," Brinton said. "We came in and it was, `What the hell is this?' We came in with an automobile into the horse-and-buggy business."

Wasser has made huge inroads in the market for paints on bridges and dams but has a long way to go if it is to sell its paints to shipping companies, pulp mills, oil refineries and food-preparation plants.

Brinton doesn't think it will be long before the company reaches $100 million in annual sales. Kidding about the company's growth curve, the owners and employees sometimes say, "There's Boeing, Microsoft and Wasser." Then some joker will say, "You mean, `There's Wasser, Boeing and Microsoft.' "

Keith Ervin's phone message number is 206-515-5632. His e-mail address is: kervin@seattletimes.com