Sherwin-Williams Breaks Ground on New Global R&D Center

The Sherwin-Williams Company (Cleveland, OH) has announced that it recently held a groundbreaking ceremony starting construction of a new global Research and Development Center.

The company says that the 600,000 square-foot facility located in Brecksville, Ohio, will bring chemists, engineers, technicians and support teams together into a state-of-the-art hub for innovation and development of the company's future products and services. The new R&D Center will support product development, coatings research, color technology and process engineering.

John G. Morikis, Sherwin-Williams Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, states, “This new R&D Center will be the global innovation epicenter for creating solutions that solve our customers' problems, as well as a key to us to retaining and attracting top talent.”

The center is part of the company’s Building Our Future project, which includes both the new R&D Center in Brecksville and a new global headquarters in Downtown Cleveland, which will be approximately 1,000,000 square-feet in size. Sherwin-Williams plans to invest a minimum of $600 million to build both the headquarters and R&D facility.

Together, the two facilities will house more than 3,500 employees with room to accommodate future growth. Sherwin-Williams estimates it will add a minimum of 400 jobs at these facilities over time, an increase of 11 percent to the company’s current local workforce. Many of these jobs will include professional staff, engineers and chemists.

The R&D Center is expected to open by the end of 2024 and is projected to generate 3,000 construction jobs.