Retaining walls are relatively rigid walls used for supporting the soil mass laterally so that the soil can be retained at different levels on the two sides. Retaining walls are structures designed to restrain soil to a slope that it would not naturally keep to (typically a steep, near-vertical or vertical slope). They are used to bound soils between two different elevations often in areas of terrain possessing undesirable slopes or in areas where the landscape needs to be shaped severely and engineered for more specific purposes like hillside farming or roadway overpasses.

The idea sketched on a napkin created a niche in the retaining wall marketplace. Idea was to create a massive retaining wall block larger than anything on the market at the time by orders of magnitude. There was a huge need in the marketplace for a retaining wall system that could rely on gravity to hold back the earth.