A year ago last August 2020 is when I started this publication. It began as an idea of helping finishers and coaters better connect and share information and best practices. Now, 12 months later, I have to say the smallest of concepts can turn into the biggest of dreams one can imagine.
Celebrating our one-year anniversary has been something I’ve been looking forward to for some time. Plant a seed, watch the flower grow. Yes, it takes a little rain and a lot of weeding, but the success of www.FinishingAndCoating.com is squarely on the shoulders of the readers in the finishing and coating industry who have taken a shine to what the site and the digital monthly magazine have brought to the community.
The overall goal was to have a community site where finishers and coaters could highlight and share their successes, create a database of where these shops and facilities were located and what they offered, create a community forum where shop owners and managers could trade thoughts and ideas, have a place to let the industry know if they had a management position open, and also provide a way for shops to possibly resell their unneeded equipment and supplies.
What came out of that small idea was various features of FinishingAndCoating.com:
- Find-A-Finisher: a database of 1,500+ shops in North America.
- Q&A Forum: a place for questions and answers to finishing and coating issues.
- Job Board: where shops and suppliers can list job openings.
- ReSell Market: where shops can sell unused supplies and used machinery.
- Supplier Database: sortable list of suppliers to the industry.
Providing these tools to finishers and coaters has been invaluable, and many shops have taken advantage of them because they are free and without charge to any shop to use.
But more importantly, these same finishers and coaters have come to FinishingAndCoating.com in droves, and to be frank, more than I could ever imagine. Since we launched last year, the visitors and users of the site have been growing and growing:
- An average of 25,116 unique visitors to FinishingAndCoating.com each month.
- An average of 199,656 article views each month.
- Over the past 12 months, a total of 301,396 total visitors.
- Over the past 12 months, 2,395,875 article pages were viewed.
Suffice to say, readers have come to enjoy the profiles and technical information we try to post every day, and they keep coming back. Yes, it puts a burden on me to generate this content and make it fresh and useful to the readers, but that is what drives and motivates us. We know that finishers and coaters don’t have a lot of time to spend reading, so we try to make it as impactful as we can.
Happy birthday to us. You, as a reader, have already given us the best gift you could give: your time and attention. Thank you.
Tim Pennington is Editor-in-Chief of Finishing and Coating, and has covered the industry since 2010. He has traveled extensively throughout North America visiting shops and production facilities, and meeting those who work in the industry. Tim began his career in the newspaper industry, then wound itself between the sports field with the PGA Tour and marketing and communications firms, and finally back into the publishing world in the finishing and coating sector. If you want to reach Tim, just go 
