Atlas Tube
How Atlas Tube removed HSS design bottleneck to increase market adoption.
Market adoption of building materials is not limited by demand. It is limited by what engineers can design quickly and defend with confidence. If a product is hard to spec into real project constraints, it gets replaced with a familiar default. Scaling adoption means removing design friction, not asking engineers to change how they work.
Atlas Tube understood this better than most. As North America's largest producer of structural steel Hollow Structural Sections (HSS) and part of Zekelman Industries, the company holds a leading market share and has grown its business from a single location with $2 million to revenue to into a $2 billion industry leader. But scale brought a different kind of challenge. At that level, simply selling more steel wasn't the answer.
The real mandate, as Chief Marketing Officer Rick Sebok describes it, was to "shape the market by growing the total use of HSS."
That mandate became urgent as engineering teams faced tighter delivery timelines, fewer experienced engineers, and little tolerance for unfamiliar workflows. Under pressure, default design approaches won - even when better options existed. For years, engineers told Atlas Tube the same thing: HSS offered clear performance advantages, but connection design was the bottleneck.
Engineers usually don't learn connection design in school; they learn it on the job, under time pressure, and HSS connections are particularly complex. If Atlas Tube wanted to grow adoption of HSS, it needed to remove that friction at scale. Connection design was the constraint, and addressing it led Atlas Tube to partner with Calcs.com and build Connections Hub.
Atlas Tube evaluated several paths: build software in-house, maintain complex spreadsheets, partner with a traditional software vendor, or double down on education. Each introduced new risks.
Building in-house would pull the team away from their core strengths and create a long-term development and maintenance burden.
Traditional software vendors risked long timelines, rigid roadmaps, limited control over the final experience, and, critically, would require significant engineering input on top of high development costs. Education alone wouldn't scale to reach the thousands of engineers Atlas Tube needed to influence.
What Atlas Tube wanted was clear: engineer-led tools, speed, and credibility. "We didn't want engineers writing code. We wanted engineers designing tools without needing to code,” said Rick.
When Atlas Tube met Calcs.com in 2024, it became clear that Calcs.com was the partner they were looking for. What differentiated Calcs.com wasn't just collaboration, it was how the platform was architected.
Calcs.com could remove friction from connection design without asking engineers to change how they worked. Calcs.com has actual structural engineers building and updating the calculators themselves, using a no-code tool that the platform's engine is built on, thus avoiding the slow handoffs and delays typical of traditional software development and keeping the engineering intent intact.
As Rick put it:
“What made the difference was engineer-to-engineer collaboration. Our engineers could speak directly with the engineers building the tool at Calcs.com, which completely changed both the speed and the outcome.”
Atlas Tube’s initial plan was a cautious beta: launch a small number of connection calculators, test, and add more over time. Rick challenged his team on that approach.
"We wanted to create a stir in the market and a cautious beta wouldn’t do it," he said. "We needed to offer enough HSS calculations and typical details to inspire engineers to try the offering."
Calcs.com team met Rick's ambition with a revised scope and clear commitment: 20 connections, fixed deadline at the NASCC steel construction industry event in April 2025. Within three months, they delivered.
"We had 400 engineers using the tool within the first month. As of February 1st, we have 2,500+ users and weekly design activity continues to increase."
That early traction gave Atlas Tube confidence to invest further. The scope expanded six-fold from the initial plan. Six months later, the Connections Hub had grown to 144 connection types and continues to expand.
That speed was a direct result of how the partnership worked. Atlas Tube’s engineers described connections the way they did in practice, and Calcs.com’s engineers translated that directly into usable tools. Decisions were made in days, not week-long review cycles, allowing the Hub to scale quickly without losing the trust of its engineer users.
Engineering capability: 144 connection calculators covering nearly every HSS connection type an engineer needs across the US and Canada standards, from the initial 20 at launch to comprehensive coverage within eight months.
Engineer adoption: 400 engineers in month one. More than 2,000 users within eight months, with weekly usage continuing to grow.
Design confidence and support: Engineers now access real-time connection design tools covering real-world needs, instead of static guidance and waiting sometimes a week for responses. Atlas Tube's team can walk engineers through live designs in real time, using the same tools.
Market and brand impact: The Hub gave Atlas Tube visibility into specification activity at the design stage, before fabricators place orders, transforming how they understand and serve their market. The shift moved Atlas Tube from product supplier to solution provider.
Atlas Tube wasn't trying to build software. They were trying to change how engineers design with HSS. Connections Hub became the lever for doing that at scale, shifting Atlas Tube’s role from product supplier to active participant in the design process.
As Rick reflects:
"When you have engineers in our team that support thousands of engineers every year, and on the Calcs.com side they're structural engineers developing the tools we're working on, it's one big brain trust just trying to make an engineer's life easier.”
That engineer-led partnership, built on transparency, speed, and shared focus on real workflows and the end user, is how Atlas Tube moved from talking about HSS potential to actively shaping how it's designed across North America.
For manufacturers selling engineered products, the implication is clear: adoption isn’t just about performance or education. It’s about removing friction from design decisions and meeting engineers where their work really happens.
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