Case study · commercial construction services
Chroma, Building the brand behind the growth.
client
CHROMA COATINGS
ENGAGEMENT
Brand Strategy,
Fractional CMO,
Digital Experience,
Growth Systems
DURATION
18 MONTHS
YEAR
2024-2025
THE SITUATION
The business had outgrown the brand.
Chroma had built its reputation the hard way: doing good work, keeping its word, and earning the next project. But, the company was changing.
What had begun as a local painting business was becoming a more sophisticated operation serving residential and commercial customers, pursuing larger opportunities, entering new markets, and thinking far beyond the next job.
The craftsmanship was there. The ambition was there. The marketing infrastructure wasn’t.
Chroma didn’t need another campaign. It needed a brand capable of carrying the business where leadership wanted to take it.
THE STRATEGY
Stop selling paint. Start selling confidence.
Paint, coatings and flooring may be what Chroma installs, but they aren’t really what the customer is buying.
A homeowner is buying trust.
A property manager is buying reliability.
A commercial partner is buying certainty that crews will show up, schedules will hold, communication won’t disappear, and the finished work will reflect well on everyone involved.
That became the foundation of the work.
Instead of building Chroma around a list of services, we built the brand around the experience of working with them.
“Master the Finish” became more than a tagline. It gave the company a standard to organize around.
THE CHALLENGE
One company. Very different buying decisions.
Residential and commercial customers may hire the same company, but they do not hire it for the same reasons.
Residential marketing needed to feel personal, reassuring and craftsmanship-driven.
Commercial marketing needed to communicate capability, professionalism, scheduling discipline and scale.
Rather than split Chroma into competing personalities, ScaleCraft created a brand architecture that allowed both sides of the business to speak directly to their buyers while still unmistakably belonging to one company.
The result was a stronger master brand instead of a collection of disconnected services.
THE BUILD
Marketing became a system, not a stack of projects.
ScaleCraft worked alongside Chroma leadership as an extension of the business, helping connect company strategy to what customers actually saw and experienced.
The work extended across brand positioning and messaging, visual identity, website strategy and development, commercial and residential customer journeys, sales materials, campaign development, content, digital lead generation and the systems supporting the sales process.
Every piece had the same job:
Make Chroma easier to understand, easier to trust and easier to choose.
That meant thinking beyond what looked good on a website.
The brand had to work in a proposal, on a truck, in a sales conversation, at a community event, on a job site and in the hands of the people representing Chroma every day.
THE BRAND
Premium without pretending.
The trades are full of brands trying to look larger than they are. That was never the goal. Chroma already had something more valuable: experienced people, strong relationships, quality work and a founder with ambitions to build something meaningful.
Our job was to make the outside finally reflect the inside. The identity became cleaner and more confident. The messaging became more precise. Photography and digital experiences put the work and the people behind it forward.
Chroma began showing up like the company it was becoming rather than the company it had been. The company was building toward a broader idea of what a trades business could be: commercially successful, technologically progressive, committed to its people and capable of using that success to create impact beyond itself.
THE RESULT
A foundation built for wherever the business goes next.
The Chroma that emerged from the engagement was no longer communicating like a small residential painting company trying to win bigger work.
It had a coherent brand, clearer market position, distinct paths for commercial and residential buyers. A modern digital presence, a stronger sales story, and a marketing foundation capable of supporting expansion into new services and markets without reinventing the company every time it grew.
The visual identity mattered. The website mattered. The campaigns mattered.
But those were outputs.
The real work was creating alignment between what Chroma believed, how Chroma operated, and what the market understood Chroma to be.
That is the difference between decorating a company and building a brand.
AJ
Eighteen months later
Craftsmanship That Gives Back
Growth brought new challenges, but also new clarity. The team recommitted to its values through community initiatives; becoming a Hall of Fame Sponsor for the West Raleigh Baseball Association and partnering with the Alpha Foundation to support families in Honduras and Mexico. The brand had evolved, but its purpose deepened: to make lasting impact both in homes and communities.
Markets and Momentum
Today, Chroma Coatings serves clients across Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Wilmington, NC, and throughout Florida; including Tampa, Orlando, Miami, and Ft. Lauderdale. They’re now known not just for the quality of their work, but for the integrity behind every project.
3.1×
Increase in inbound quote requests
$26K
Increase in average contract value
ScaleCraft’s partnership wasn’t just a rebrand; it was a revelation.
Chroma entered the engagement needing better marketing. What it built was something more valuable: A brand capable of keeping up with the business.
HELLO@SCALECRAFT.IO