What’s your Colorado manufacturing IQ? Take this quiz and find out.
Last week, with a push from the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry, Governor John Hickenlooper proclaimed this workweek ‘Manufacturing Week’ in Colorado, adding a regional flavor to Friday’s national Manufacturing Day.
It’s music to our ears, so we thought we’d join the festivities with a pop quiz celebrating Colorado’s broad, dynamic manufacturing community. Go ahead and test your Colorado manufacturing IQ.
1. Denver’s Ocean Journey uses this global-leading acrylic designer and aquarium builder for its watery enclosures. Name the firm.
2. Air Force pilots and musical stars like Def Leppard beat a path to this Colorado Springs manufacturer of custom audio apparatus.
3. This growing Denver-based apparel company was launched by an entrepreneur who guessed Tiger Woods would lead a new generation of kids into golf – and into a new golf apparel category.
4. Colorado’s the national epicenter of the natural and organic food business, but also fertile ground for the launch of ‘fast and fresh’ restaurant start-ups. Name two not named Chipotle.
5. Colorado food manufacturers – co-packers – changed the face of the natural food industry. Name two of Colorado’s current crop of food innovators.
6. Founded before Columbus discovered America (can you believe it?), this European company opened its first-ever U.S. manufacturing facility in Pueblo last May, impressed by a deep regional connection to steel. (Also a gimme – from this weeks issue.)
7. Manufacturing accounts for 91% of all Colorado exports and over 130,000 jobs. What’s the annual average compensation for manufacturing employees?
a. $33,000
b. $53,000
c. $73,000
d. $93,000
8. This Colorado firm is emulating the texture from what animal to inhibit bacterial growth on surfaces of all kinds?
9. Kids frolic on the oversized, colorful commercial playgrounds in the Cherry Creek Shopping Center and in dozens of locations nationwide, designed and manufactured by this Denver company.
10. This Colorado lifestyle brand builds titanium cycles, one at a time, at its very cool manufacturing facility in Steamboat Springs.
11. More products are manufactured from the following product categories in Colorado than any others. Rank them in order, by dollar volume.
a. Food and beverage and tobacco product manufacturing
b. Computer and electronic product manufacturing
c. Chemical manufacturing
12. This Durango brewery and first-mover extended its brand and launched a new company that manufacturers automated canning equipment for the beverage industry.
13. This Colorado apparel firm sources high-altitude wool in the Rocky Mountains then ‘supercharges’ its natural attributes with tiny increments of synthetic fiber. Name this performance-apparel brand.
14. A Boulder company has has revolutionized bike-fitting with a proprietary system manufactured here in part and used throughout the cycling world. Who’s this progressive maker?
Of course most of these great companies were featured in CompanyWeek the past twelve months. Read more and raise you Colorado manufacturing IQ.
And celebrate American manufacturing this week: patronize a Colorado maker or manufacturer.
Answers: 1. Reynolds Polymer; 2. Westone Laboratories; 3. Garb; d; 4. Garbanzo, Larkburger; 5. The Kitchen Coop, Fresca Foods; 6. pewag; 7. C; 8. Sharklet Technologies; 9. Playtime; 10. Moots; 11. b, a, c; 12. Ska Brewing; 13. Voormi; 14. Retul.