The project demanded an approach as thoughtful and technically robust as MSA itself. MSA’s team came to Echo wanting to document the company’s first 100 years, but the scale, technical depth, and emotional stakes of their legacy made it anything but straightforward. They’d grown into a global organization with complex business lines, a rich engineering culture, and a staff working in dozens of languages and settings.

The bar was high. The tone needed to strike the right balance between dignity and pride. And above all, the final product had to reflect a century of innovation and the purpose behind it.

We built the narrative around three pillars:

• Life-saving innovation
• Global service to hazardous industries
• A century of people-first values

Drawing on internal interviews, site visits, and archival research, we created a structure that let the complexity breathe across 12 richly illustrated chapters organized around pivotal moments, products, and people. The design supported this layered storytelling approach. Clean, confident layouts gave space for engineering detail and emotional reflection to coexist, with sharp typographic hierarchy, archival black-and-white photography, and a contemporary but restrained colour palette that signalled trust, stability, and precision.

The tone of the writing also had to balance the technical with the emotional. That first chapter — grounded in the human impact of 9/11 — set the bar, and every page that followed honoured that same duality. Each section conveyed not just what MSA makes, but why it matters.

The final chapter closes with data that puts MSA in rare company: only 486 U.S. publicly traded firms have reached 100 years; just 23 private companies with audited financials have done the same. “Very few businesses last for 100 years,” one expert said. “Companies that survive that long are a special and rarefied group.”