The Big Challenge

Entering its seventh year, Sloss.Tech stood at a pivotal moment. Tech Birmingham came to Big Com with an ambitious vision: expand their signature event to three days, welcome over 1,000 attendees, and transform Sloss Tech from a Birmingham tech event into the Southeast's innovation and culture conference. With six consecutive sold-out years behind them, we needed to create a cohesive brand architecture for new experiences—including a first-ever pitch competition and music event—while preserving Sloss.Tech's authentic local identity.

The Big Insight

The Southeast tech scene isn’t trying to be Silicon Valley—it’s building something scrappier, hungrier and more human. These founders don’t want another polished, climate-controlled conference experience. They want intensity. They want to feel the heat. Real innovation doesn’t happen in comfort zones. It happens when you’re fired up.

So we leaned into it. The hottest tech conference in the country—hottest as in can’t-miss, turning-up-the-heat-on-what’s-possible. Also hottest as in... it’s late June in Alabama and the average temp is 99.99°.

How We Went Big

We refreshed Sloss.Tech's visual identity, allowing the "dot" in "Sloss.Tech" to bridge Birmingham's industrial past and tech future, leading to a modernized logo, updated website, reimagined social media, and distinctive sub-brands for Sloss.Tech/Ideas (the first-ever Southeast regional pitch competition) and ShinDigit@l (the official music experience afterparty). To cool things off, we partnered with Trim Tab Brewing Company to create "cooldown," Sloss.Tech's official beer, launched at ShinDigit@l.

How we went bigger

Good PR is powerful, and we raised the bar. With 5 on-air press hits and 137 on print and digital, we expanded Sloss.Tech's reach far beyond Birmingham, earning regional and national media attention. These efforts led to significant increases in attendance, ticket sales, sponsorships, and digital reach.

The Big Impact

We transformed Sloss.Tech into the Southeast's go-to innovation gathering, created a cohesive brand experience across all event components, boosted sponsorship revenue by 82.9% and sold out the conference for its seventh consecutive year. Together with Tech Birmingham, we proved that when steel meets startups and small talk leads to big ideas, you forge meaningful connections that drive real innovation.