THE CLIENT
The Hilliard Corporation has been manufacturing in Elmira, New York, since 1905. What began as a single-product business — a friction disconnect clutch — has grown over 120 years into a global engineering company serving customers across power generation, mining, marine, oil and gas, manufacturing, and food and beverage industries worldwide. Their products can be found in Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike, on every continent.
Hilliard is one of the most enduring employers in the Southern Tier. They started with roughly 30 employees in 1905 and have grown to hundreds today. They are ISO 9001:2015-certified, manufacture their products in Elmira, and explicitly state that their mission includes being a good community supporter in the region where they are rooted. For more than a century, when Elmira needed a manufacturer that stayed, Hilliard stayed.
THE BRIEF
120 years is a rare thing. Very few companies — anywhere, in any industry — survive and grow across that span. Hilliard reached that milestone in 2025, and they reached a second one simultaneously: their filtration division, Hilco, was celebrating its own 100th anniversary. Two major milestones in the same year, for a company that has been an anchor of the Southern Tier economy for generations.
They needed a video that could carry all of that. Something that honored the people, the history, and the engineering legacy — and that could serve as Hilliard’s official public-facing commemoration of the milestone for customers, partners, and employees around the world.
They called BWM.
WHAT BWM DID
Brave World Media shot, edited, conducted interviews, and brought Hilliard’s 120 years of manufacturing history to life through a feature video and animated timeline. The animated timeline was a deliberate creative choice — turning what could have been a static recitation of dates into a visual narrative that moves, building the story of a company that has continually evolved from its founding through the present day.
The interviews capture the human dimension of Hilliard’s history: the people behind the products, the engineers, the workers, the institutional knowledge that makes a 120-year-old manufacturing company something more than a business. That’s the story that a press release can’t tell — and the reason a video like this matters.
THE REACH
Hilliard published BWM’s video as its official 120th-anniversary content on its website and YouTube channel. The anniversary was not a quiet milestone — Hilliard convened more than 100 international distributors and partners for a multi-day celebration in Elmira, with representatives flying in from the UK, continental Europe, and beyond. Filterserve, Hilliard’s exclusive UK and Benelux distributor for over 30 years, published a dedicated feature about the trip, describing the event as marking both 120 years of Hilliard’s innovation and 100 years of Hilco. BWM’s video is the piece of content that accompanied every one of those attendees when they returned home — the story they could share with their teams, networks, and customers.
For a B2B industrial company, that is exactly what an anniversary video is supposed to do.
WHY THIS KIND OF WORK MATTERS
Anniversary and legacy videos are one of the most demanding creative formats in corporate video work. There’s no product launch, no campaign hook, no external news peg. There’s just the weight of a company’s history — and the challenge of making that history feel alive, specific, and worth watching.
BWM brought to this project what we bring to all of our work: an understanding that the best institutional storytelling is built on the same principles as any good story. Real people. Specific details. A sense of place. The animated timeline gave the history structure; the interviews gave it feeling. Together, they gave Hilliard a piece of content that can represent the company for years to come.