Sightline Commercial Solutions might not be a household name for most sports fans, but the Minneapolis company has been quietly leaving its imprint on stadiums and other prominent venues for decades.
The fabricator of custom-engineered architectural railing and staging systems has completed hundreds of projects in its three-plus decades of business. Among those are local and national landmarks such as U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Allianz Field in St. Paul, PNC Stadium in Houston and Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
Most recently, the company landed work on the future Boston Scientific headquarters in Maple Grove, a $170 million, 400,000-square-foot building that will house research and development labs, office support areas and training spaces on a 40-acre site near Interstate 694 and Highway 169.
Also in the company’s pipeline are projects for the new Buffalo Bills stadium and various Major League Soccer arenas, among others.
Tim Orr, engineering manager of Sightline Commercial Solutions, said the company has been staying busy in recent years. With more people getting out since the end of the COVID-19 restrictions, its workload has picked up dramatically, Orr said.
“Obviously, we're a few years out of post-COVID. The live events are certainly surging, and just the influx of people returning to that and going out and seeing live events, concerts, sports teams” has been good for business, Orr said.
Architectural railings are part of an estimated $51 billion global market as of 2022, and the market was expected to growth 4.8% annually from 2023 to 2030, according to market research and consulting company Grand View Research .
Increasing government investments in residential and non-residential construction are expected to help drive growth in the market, according to Grand View.
For its part, Sightline Commercial Solutions was founded in 1990 as Staging Concepts, Orr said. At the time, the company did primarily portable platform work, but has rebranded and changed ownership through the years. Orr said the company currently has about 150 employees overall, including 15 to 20 engineers.
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With projects across the hospitality, health care, worship and retail sectors, the business has “continued to diversify within the commercial construction market,” and has provided staging and railing services for events as an
NCAA Final Four Tournament , Sundance Film Festival and a
presidential inauguration , according to a company press release.
In December 2022, Trex Commercial Solutions sold the assets of its wholly owned subsidiary, Trex Commercial Products Inc., to Sightline Commercial Solutions, LLC. A December 2022 earnings report indicates that the sale price was $8.25 million.
Bryan Fairbanks, president and CEO of Trex Commercial, said in a December 2022 press release that Trex Commercial products were installed “in some of the largest and most prestigious sporting and entertainment venues in the country.”
In a recent interview, Orr told Finance & Commerce that Sightline Commercial Solutions still does “a lot of the staging and portable platform work that we've been doing for 30-plus years. We also do architectural, ornamental guardrail, handrail glazing” with a big focus on the sports market.
One of the company’s signature projects was at Target Center in downtown Minneapolis. As part of the building’s 2017 renovation, Sightline Commercial Solutions installed upgraded railings designed to improve guest safety and aesthetics.
“We had some post-mounted guardrail glazing options with a tinted interlayer, so it gives it kind of a kind of an opaque look,” Orr said.
From a big-picture perspective, Orr said there’s “so much money in the sports world, and [it feels like] the lifecycle of stadiums has shrunk considerably, where they're getting about 20, 25, years out of these stadiums. Then they demolish them and build up a new one.”
Sightline Commercial Solutions Business: Architectural railings and staging system company
Headquarters: Minneapolis
Chief Engineering Officer: Jon Chase
Employees: 150
Founded: 1990
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