Stone Craft, Denver

   In 1989, when company President Jo Anne Martino and associate Dwight Nelson combined their existing business, Versatile, with one owned by Martino’s friend (Bob Kriznar’s Kriznar Tile and Marble), Stone Craft started out with just 598 ft², six employees and a wet saw bought for $1,000 from a shop in Texas.
   And it wasn’t long, Martino says, before Stone Craft began to expand both its facilities and capabilities at an impressive rate. By 1991, Martino relocated to a large office and fabrication building on the company’s current site the company now occupies; after renting the 11,200 ft² facility for about a year, Stone Craft purchased it outright.
   Not content with expanding more than 20-fold from their original facility, Stone Craft soon saw additional opportunities within the Denver market and, by the end of 2000,  added an 18,000 ft² manufacturing facility and a 12,000 ft² facility for cultured-marble and solid-surface production.
   Today, the comapny runs, among others, a dual-table Breton CNC, a new Montresor line polisher, two Zonato saws, and additional saws from Sawing Systems and FOMA – and employs 67.
  
A CHANGING MARKET
   Martino attributes a good part of her company’s success to two things: Stone Craft’s overall diversification into some profitable new ventures, and her background as a minority businesswoman.
   Martino, raised in Pueblo, Colo., is an outspoken and assertive Italian-American with a side passion for politics. To her companies’ benefit, she employed her background, gender and overall business acumen to pursue and land a number of lucrative contracts to install stone products throughout the Denver metro area.
   Among those jobs were deals to install stonework in American Airlines’ Admirals Club at the old Stapleton International Airport, another to hang 278,000 ft² of German dove-tailed tile through a highway tunnel near Glenwood Springs, and yet another to supply and install 5,500 pieces of tile for an art installation at the new Denver International Airport.
   With the business’s facilities and capabilities growing by the year, Martino found Stone Craft able to not only serve its initial customer base – custom home builders, home remodelers, kitchen and bath shops, and interior designers – but also some very profitable new wholesale business as well, including contracts with Home Depot.
   Martino says that when she entered the Denver market, there were three main competitors doing work similar to Stone Craft’s. Since then, one competitor went out of business and a few operations have sprung up in its place.
   
A NOD TO DIVERSIFICATION
   Martino says her current position within the market is growing stronger of late, due in large part to an effort to maintain the company’s core business while finding new markets.
   “We feel that we’re getting stronger within our market because of the way we’ve diversified our business,” she says. “We know that the main core is countertops, but we also know that along, with countertops, go the sinks, the faucets and the kitchen cabinets.”
   And just to be safe, Stone Craft has also expanded into manufacturing high-end cultured marble shower pans and shower walls, as well. All of which has allowed the company to garner additional business in growing markets, while staying true to the company’s core customers, she says.
   “Not only are we catering to the new homes, but we’re catering to the remodelers and homeowners who want to update their bathrooms but can’t afford the cost that goes along with the remodeling,” she says. “Moving the plumbing to match the top-shelf shower pans can be expensive. To solve that problem, we’ll go in and make it to where your drain is retro-fit to what is pre-existing. That eliminates a lot of the cost.”
   Noting that many companies now create countertops, Martino says Stone Craft incorporates emerald gemstones onto the surface of high-end models sold through its showrooms as an effort to establish itself as the preeminent fabricator in the area.
   “It represents the fact that we’re a cut above the competition,” she says.
   Another, and possibly the most-lucrative, new source of business for the company has been fabricating and supplying countertops to most Home Depot stores throughout Colorado. Since 2001, when Stone Craft acquired a contract with the big-box retailer from another company, Home Depot has come to represent a significant part of Martino’s business.
   While it’s reasonable to assume that a contract of that size might trump Stone Craft’s existing customers when it comes to turnaround time, Martino feels it’s important to ensure that orders bound for Home Depot don’t delay any other existing orders.
   “All of our customers are treated equally, and even Home Depot has to follow our turnaround time of 10-14 days from time of template,” she says. “That is mainly for the benefit of our other customers. You don’t get shoved aside or pushed away because you are a smaller customer.
   “We treat each account equally. We don’t believe that, because you’re a big-box store, your customers are any more important than the customers of, say, the smaller home builders.”
   Even with the increased volume created by the company’s contract with Home Depot, Stone Craft is able to produce up to a dozen kitchens a day with one eight-hour shift.
  
AN EVOLVING PRODUCT MIX
   Alongside changing competitors and a shifting base of customers, Stone Craft’s product mix progressed considerably throughout the years as well.
   While the company’s initial offering – granite—thrived in recent years in a market of falling prices and increased fabrication, Stone Craft also became a major importer of foreign stone and pre-fabricated countertops.
   The company currently imports stone, primarily granite, from Brazil and Italy; and, from China, it imports approximately 90 percent of the pre-fabricated counter tops sold by Home Depot stores serviced by the company.
   Martino says that while the vast majority of her customers use granite in new homes because of its uniqueness and growing affordability, engineered-stone products like Cambria® are now growing in popularity with both fabricators and homeowners.
   “The quartz product, like Cambria, is starting to become very popular too because it’s very low-maintenance; you don’t have to seal it,” she says. “And, the consistency is great.”
   Martino says Cambria® fits well into Stone Crafts’ existing product line, and allows the company to satisfy a greater number of customers.
   “(With Cambria®) we now we have the ability to give our customer every type of countertop surface they could want, from (DuPont’s) Corian ® to natural-quartz product, as well as the granite,” Martino says.
   While a shift to natural-quartz products is a significant change in the countertop industry, Martino says the biggest changes apply to granite itself.
   “The countertop industry as whole is changing rapidly,” she says. “When I first started in this business, granite was only for the elite. Now, with the new processes and the price of the stone going down, it’s becoming more and more common.”
  
KEYS TO SUCCESS: STABILITY, LONGEVITY
   Martino often jokes about her age — “sometimes I feel like me and stone came in at right around the same time” – but her longevity, along with her company’s, is a priceless commodity. She attributes a good deal of Stone Craft’s success to her 28-year career in the stone business, and she regularly uses it as a selling point when establishing new business relationships or maintaining old ones.
   “People can have a sense of security knowing that we won’t just pick up and go away,” she says. “And with our facilities, we can’t.”
   That stability, she says, helps to offset Stone Craft’s price position, which is competitive but surely not the lowest on the market. It’s nearly impossible to compete on price with a fabricator that might be working with little overhead and minimal, if any, facilities, she adds.
   In cases where customers want to compare stone companies on price, Martino is sure to note that other aspects, namely service and quality, play a vital role in overall customer satisfaction.
   “Lets face it, most people look at the dollars and cents first,” she says. “They often want the best job at the lowest price, but we all know that doesn’t happen. You usually get what you pay for.
   “People come in and ask us why our prices are much higher, and we try to tell them that it takes time to lay out the seams, it takes time to cut the stone slabs, and it takes time to ensure the edges will be true when you put them together,” she adds. “The only way that a customer can get a good job is to let us have enough time to fabricate it right. Our turnaround time is 10 to 14 working days; there are other people who can do jobs in three days. But what are you getting?”
   Ultimately, Martino believes the best way to overcome the price hurdle is by educating the customer about what they receive for the extra cost. She often does that by taking a concerned customer on a tour of the fabrication shop.
   “That helps them to understand why, on a custom product, you can’t do it overnight and get the quality you’re looking for,” she says.
   In the next two years, Martino and Stone Craft are looking to take such lessons from the Denver market and apply them in new ones, duplicating their business model and opening shops in new markets across the United States. Stone Craft will maintain ownership of these new satellite locations and take on new partners to operate them. 
   So, does that mean that Martino feels that she has the stone business all figured out? That she’s got it all dialed in, and can relax and let Stone Craft be, as is?
   Not even close.
   “You can always improve your customer service and your quality, and you can always better educate your employees and customers,” she says with a tone that sounds eerily like a word of warning to future competition.
   “That will never stop.”
   Jake Rishavy is a Denver-based writer covering industrial-design topics.

This article first appeared in the March 2006 print edition of Stone Business. ©2006 Western Business Media Inc.