From Brand Identity to Building Identity
I spent years building brand identities for some of the world's biggest companies. Today I do the same thing, just in cement and foam.
My name is Davide Aternino, Principal at Mouldex Composites. I've been around construction since I was a kid. My family had a painting business, and I was working in it since elementary school, no Christmas breaks, no March breaks, no summers off, as far back as I can remember. That was just what our family did.
Funny enough, that's not where I thought I'd end up. I went to school for branding and identity. I've always been the creative type, and for years I worked in the creative industry, building brands, not buildings. In 2003, an opportunity came up to partner at a company called Mouldex Mouldings, and I took it.
I didn't walk in and start doing marketing though. I started in production, doing the jobs nobody else wanted to touch. Eventually I got trained on the technical side of the business, which honestly felt like a totally different world from the creative work I was used to. But looking back, I think that's the best thing that could've happened. I understood the product from the foundation up.
As the company grew, so did our marketing budget and I naturally eased into that role. I ended up handling a lot of customer relations too, talking to architects, designers, contractors, basically anyone who wanted to know more about what we made. Site visits, office visits, tradeshows all over the world. Over time my role kept expanding, and eventually I took on a bigger partnership and a lot more responsibility across the business.
The Great American State Fair
Our real break came in 2025, when we were asked to be the official fabricator for the Great American State Fair. I was personally invited by the President of the United States for dinner at the White House (the food was great). After securing the project, we had 60 days to deliver over 30,000 linear feet of exterior moldings and more than 60,000 square feet of exterior wall panels for the National Mall. It was intense. A crew of 140, 20 hour work days and a few national security threats but we did it.
We were also brought onto Tiffany & Co.'s newly reimagined flagship store at Yorkdale in Toronto, a SANAA designed space spanning 8,000 square feet across five rooms. Our custom cove mouldings, with a knife edge profile and LED lighting built right in, ended up being the backbone of the store's signature spaces. We built and installed four column wraps, 28 inches in diameter and 30 feet tall. Each room only took about three days to finish, start to install.
Read the Tiffany & Co. case study
Here's the part I really love about all this. It's still design work, just in a different form. I used to build brand identity for some of the biggest companies in the world. Now I'm doing the same kind of creative work, for some of the biggest brands on the planet, just with cement and foam instead of a logo file.
What that actually means for you, if we end up working together: I've done the production work myself, so I know what it actually takes to build and install a profile, not just what it looks like on a spec sheet. I came from branding, so finish and presentation aren't afterthoughts to me, they're the whole point. And after years of site visits and tradeshows and just talking to architects and contractors directly, I have a concrete sense of what you actually need from a project partner, because I've spent most of my career sitting on your side of that conversation.
Let's Talk About Your Project
Whether it's a single room or a seven month build, I'd be glad to hear about it.