Why Not Yours?

July 5, 2004

   Most of you will remember the Best of Home from last December’s issue. Stone Business showcased several sharp residential jobs; the winner, from Northwestern Marble and Granite Co. in Edina, Minn., also took home a Pinnacle Award in December from the Marble Institute of America Inc. (MIA).
   We’re getting an early start this year on the competition. The deadline for getting your best residential work to us isn’t until October 14, but entry forms are ready now; there’s a link that brings up the simple, two-page document as a PDF file. (If you’re not familiar with PDFs, it’s a good time to start now – you can get Adobe Reader as a free download at www.adobe.com to read and print the files.)
   You can submit as many entries as you like; there’s no fee or any strings attached. The flip side is that there’s no money handed out to the winners – the recognition is having the top jobs published in the December 2004 issue of Stone Business.
   We get an obvious benefit from having plenty of great pictures of outstanding work in residential stone. However, we’re not doing this for some nice layouts in the magazine – this is for the thousands of fabricators who turn out fantastic work in their day-to-day business.
   The concept of the Best of Home Awards came from a conversation I had some 15 years ago from a fabricator in another industry. He flipped through a current magazine in that particular trade, noting page after page of beautiful work.
   “Yeah, this is great,” he said. “But it’s all museum-piece stuff.”
   He wasn’t referring to the location, either. He recognized the talent and skill behind all the pieces, but nearly all of it was specialized and placed in projects with sky’s-the-limit budgets for design and materials. He knew the work was good, but he couldn’t relate to it.
   The same thoughts probably pass through your mind when you see the images offered in Stone Business from other competitions. We publish them for the superlative work from designers and architects around the world. But, in many cases, something’s missing – namely, the kind of jobs that face fabricators every day.
   Plenty of pride and skill go into thousands of kitchens, bathrooms, patios, pool decks and other residential areas. The work is more than a couple of cutouts and a square-angle edge, because fabricators care about the job and their customers. It’s more than a commodity item where the primary feature is the per-square-foot price tag.
   Residential projects aren’t ignored in competitions – the MIA, for example, features them as a category in its Pinnacle Awards – but why not something exclusively for the bread-and-butter jobs that are anything but workaday stuff? Shouldn’t fabricators have their due, instead of being regarded as nameless workers in some grandiose development?
   That’s why Stone Business offers the Best of Home Awards. It’s your competition. You can be recognized in a competition of your peers; you can also see great work that you can recognize as coming from shops like yours.
   You can’t lose by entering. The more good jobs we receive, the harder it is for us to limit the presentation to one or two projects. You may not take the top honors, but there’s a good chance you’ll be recognized among fellow fabricators.
   All we ask is that you take the time to fill out the form and send it in, along with the images of those outstanding jobs. Start planning your entries now, and don’t delay – October 14 is the final day for submissions.

   Speaking of sending things to Stone Business – several e-mails came in after my column on sizing the U.S. dimensional-stone market. Since they weren’t designated as for-publication letters, I won’t reprint them. However, the contents are worth mentioning.
   One stone producer took me to task in underestimating the amount of stone coming from domestic quarries. To that, I’d readily plead guilty… if I had all the facts.
   Domestic production figures are based on annual studies from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). I certainly won’t question the work of the USGS; it’s doing the best it can, given than stone production from smaller quarries often passes under the statistical radar.
   Trying to identify all the sources and estimate production, especially with architectural (often called rubble) stone is particularly difficult. One private-sector researcher recently noted that some quarry visits ended quickly with owners stating that production figures were their own business, with the occasional shotgun in hand to provide distinct punctuation.
   Another stone producer noted that his company regularly tracks U.S. stone consumption, and my $5.37 billion final retail value may still be too conservative by some $4 billion. As I noted, it’s a guessing game, but hopefully we’ll get more estimates on the table to properly size our industry.
   I don’t mind the letters on this, or any other topic. Just note if you’re willing to have them published, and I’ll get them in future issues of Stone Business.