Showrooms: Going Digital

   Suppliers Mystic Granite and Marble and MS International (MSI) make heavy use of the World Wide Web in selling their stone.
   Mystic’s Darlene Spezzi explains that she has a three-person staff that works through the company’s marketing department to constantly upgrade what appears on its Website.
   “Each container has seven bundles, and our photographer will take a photo of the front slab in each bundle,” she says. “We put it online and fabricators can see a slab from each bundle, which can be important, especially if it’s a stone with a lot of movement.”
   Spezzi admits it can be a lot of work, but she says her goal is to make it easy for fabricators to go online and place their orders.
   MSI takes that a step further. Recognizing the need for individual buyers to see the stones in actual applications, the company develops room scenes that incorporate its different stones. The photos are available at the company’s showroom, but are also accessible through the Web.
   “We’ve spent a lot of time, money and effort developing these room scenes,” says that company’s Rupesh Shah. “Our goal is that for every color of stone we have at least one room scene so people can internalize it.”
   While the company’s goal is to have 100 percent of its offerings available electronically, Shah estimates that the figure is currently about 60 percent.
   Even a camera and a good digital print can go a long way toward selling some jobs. One of the highlights of the Northwestern Marble and Granite showroom is a large radius in the middle of the area on which backlit photos of some of the company’s better jobs are mounted, complete with captions.
   David Gramling calls the images, “museum-quality,’ and says they not only bring people into the room, but they’ve been known to sell a job or two.
   “One day we had a couple who are quite well-to-do come in,” Gramling says. “The wife took one look at a photo and said, ‘I want the exact same thing, the same look, the same granite, the same everything.’ She was here five minutes and bought a job costing $22,000, so it does work.”
   On a more-practical side, Tony Beber of Anaheim Centsible Tile says along with sending a sample home with a client, he’ll take a digital photo of the slab that’s been chosen and e-mail it.
   “I don’t want a mistake,” he says. “If we’re doing an island, I’ll ask where the woman wants the upper right-hand corner. She can mark it and send it back and we’re all happy.”
   While not every client is interested, if someone is curious about how their stone will be fabricated, you don’t have to start giving guided tours of the shop, either. Chris Mian of Louis W. Mian says that company includes information about fabrication on its Website.
   “It doesn’t have any real animated features, but it is pretty extensive,” he says.
   When it comes to animation, the prize is probably taken by Marble and Granite Gallery. Phil Mularoni has eschewed the Internet for a bank of DVD players on one wall near the showroom’s entrance.
   “We have six TVs with presentations going all the time,” he says. “We condensed all the tapes to 12-14 minutes, but they’re an overview of everything from finding granite to removing the blocks, polishing them, cutting them and then how they move through the process, ending up as a countertop.”
   Mularoni feels the interactive presentations are part of the service he tries to offer above and beyond what’s offered by the normal slab wholesaler.
   “We sell materials at all price levels and we’re really no different than anyone else,” he concludes. “But, we like to think we’re giving more to the customer for the dollar.”

This article first appeared in the October 2005 print edition of Stone Business. ©2005 Western Business Media Inc.