Paint by Numbers
Sometimes, it's important to reflect on how far we've come.
Seventeen years ago, as many of you know, painting advertisements was a dying craft. Sign painters were limited to a few painting walls in in NY & LA. Most OOH inventory was converting to digital or traditional vinyl and the future of the sign painting trade looked grim.
Despite all odds, we had the vision, the passion, the hustle and the grit to bring it back. We knew that in order to revive the craft, we not only had to bring on board the best sign painters in the nation, but we needed to seed new generations.
To make that happen we started the Colossal Paint Apprentice Program. It remains to this day the only school of its kind in the world. And in the past seventeen years, we’ve trained over 100 painters, from all over the world, from all different walks of life and past trades. Our team has the most cumulative experience of any hand paint company in the world, with the most professional, trusted, and talented painters in the industry.
Through our Apprentice Program, an Apprentice with zero training ranks up over 5 years to an Expert Painter skilled to paint photorealistic murals perfect enough that Taylor Swift shows up to see her exquisitely painted face.
The Apprentice Program is tried-and-true but for too many years we have faced a challenge — not enough painters to keep up with client demand. We have a plan to grow the team and employ more artists. The plan begins with finding someone dedicated to finding Painters. Cue Carmen. Last year our first-ever in-house Recruiter Carmen Rodgers joined us as Director of Talent. In just 6 months Carmen has onboarded twenty Painters. That is 50% growth on our paint team in 2021!
“With over 15 years of experience identifying and hiring talent in a broad variety of industries, I am excited to take all that I have learned to improve what I can on an already incredible team. There is no other organization that works at the level or scale as Colossal. And my goal is to secure top talent to ensure we remain our industry’s standard and only option for commercial murals. ”
This year Carmen and the team are sprinting forward and trying new things so we hit our ambitious goal of increasing our paint team by another 25%. To move fast and efficiently we created Trial Days which have proven to be effective. On Trial Days top talent is invited to our shop and their basic skills are tested resulting in a streamlined interview process.
“Since joining the Colossal team ten years ago, it’s been exciting to see the paint team grow from ten full-time painters in NYC to now over 40 painters with a shop in both NYC and LA. With each generation of painters, we push the craft to new heights. It’s an honor to work with the best team on the planet. ”
New partnerships with community organizations like The Hope Program and Sprocket Murals help to recruit talent but also allow us to have deeper conversations within the community and amongst artists. Last year Carmen also headed out to LA to speak at the LA Trade Tech College with hopes of educating and attracting talent who will help us grow our LA team.
We are passionate about employing more artists and we are committed to hitting our colossal goal to grow our team of painters from our current crew of 44 to 100 by 2025. This is all possible because of our clients’ support of the craft we all universally love.
If you're interested in applying for a role at Colossal, see postings here.
