We've all had customers who've told us that our products are too expensive for their needs and their budgets. That's true whether it is a great website for countertop business or a countertop business itself. In some cases, you may have had to pass up the sale, or you may have considered cutting corners in quality, performance or service in order to justify lower prices. We all know that some opportunistic countertop businesses offer inferior products and services on a regular basis and even make them part of their standard offerings. But, for those businesses who are in it for the long-term, this type of behavior often has an unintended side effect: negative brand imaging.
Advertising and marketing are powerful forces for bringing new clients through your doors and helping you maintain those all-important repeat customers, but these efforts can only do so much. Just as promises mean little unless backed by actions, marketing must be backed by quality products and services for maximum effect. If you can't deliver quality, customers will begin to think of your company as second-rate, which directly affects your brand image.
Regardless of advertising, your brand image is reflected by your products and services in general. If bargain options become popular, you will be relegated into an exclusive category that may not permit you to break through with your top-quality items. Why would someone go to McDonald's when what he or she really wants is a prime rib dinner? Time and again McDonald's has tried to lure in a higher class of clientele by offering "premium" sandwiches, including steak, but each attempt has been met with limited success at best. These products disappear just as quickly as they appeared and are never seen again.
When trying to cater to clients who simply don't want to pay for quality products, it does you a disservice to provide low-quality countertops. Your customers may be pleased at first, but they will quickly come to resent your products or think of you exclusively as a purveyor of cheap goods fit only for low-end applications.You are much better off being the best option instead of the cheapest option.
The only way to cut prices without sacrificing quality is to audit your operations in order to identify and eliminate waste. However, even then, price declines are a slippery slope that is not easy to reverse without damaging your client base. A second option to consider might be to offer financing that requires affordable down payments or easy payment plans. A low-interest financing option might actually increase your margins while also increasing the overall value of your projects by taming a possible sticker shock by allowing the cost to be spread out over a reasonable period of time.
Another idea to consider is to offer additional services or benefits that are valuable to the customer, but have very low hard costs. Electronics companies discovered long ago that they could make a 70 percent to 200 percent profit margin by selling extended warranties. These insurance add-ons seem like a great idea to customers, but they are needed so rarely that they are money in the bank. In this same vein, you can increase how much your customers are willing to spend without sacrificing quality by increasing the apparent value of your products. A few suggestions include coordinating plumbers to connect sinks or offering free trivets and cutting boards in matching colors.
Whatever you do, you do not want to mar your brand image and become known as the "cheap" countertop company. That is not to say there aren't successful discount countertop fabricators in the industry. However, providing high quality products, unique services and attentive support is a better way to differentiate your business from the others instead of playing the pricing game.
Let us know if you have other opinions or ideas on the topic. We would like to hear what is working for you. Feel free to comment here or drop us a line at info@countertopresource.com.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Friday, April 4, 2014
A Different Idea for Supplying Engineered Stone
At our website for countertop fabricators and countertop professionals, we recently heard about a new company that has a much different philosophy about how it supplies quartz surfacing to fabricators - QuartzSource - and we thought it was worth sharing.
The man behind the company is Evan Kruger, the owner of Solid Tops, a fabrication company in Maryland that works with granite, quartz surfacing, solid surface, and a variety of other premium surfacing materials. I did some research and Kruger seems to have a pretty solid reputation in the industry, being one of the first fabricators to receive MIA Accreditation, one of the founders of EOS Surfaces, a past board member and president of ISFA and a founding member of the Artisan Group. Kruger is known for his industry involvement and innovation, and so it comes as little surprise that he created QuartzSource in a much different manner than most material suppliers.
In discussing the company with Kruger, he said his new business ships quality slabs directly to fabricators' doors from the manufacturer in Asia, unbranded. Yes, you read that correctly, there is no brand name associated with the product at all. The reason behind the business model, according to Kruger, is because he has seen how some fabricators have built up brand recognition for big quartz surfacing companies only to have those companies give a 30-day notice and then open their own fabrication shops or give exclusivity to another fabricator in that area and basically take the business away from the fabricators who had worked so diligently to build their brand in the first place. Kruger believes that fabricators need to have control of their own branding message if they are to regain the ground lost during the past 7 to 8 years. The “skin in the game” for Kruger is this very lack of owning his customers' brand. He said, “If I do a poor job supplying my customers, they can take their business elsewhere because they own the brand name! The customer doesn’t need to buy from me to keep his own brand intact. Therefore I need to be very diligent to serve him well and that gives my customers a lot of confidence to invest.”
When developing the idea, he started thinking about how fabricators could feel more comfortable about putting so much effort into branding a product without fear of it being taken away from them. He knew the product had to be not only free of a corporate brand, but also be of high quality and come in innovative colors that would be sell well, while being at a competitive price. That way businesses could make a good profit on a material they could then brand as their own product.
After coming up with the idea, he then needed to find a supplier that could produce to his specs at a good price. So, he went to Asia, where he had developed numerous contacts over the years, and began looking for a quality quartz product that would be available at a reasonable price.
After extensive research and development, he found a process he thought would meet his demands and tested it against some of the bigger manufacturers’ products to make sure it met or exceeded their quality. With the proper test results achieved, he worked to develop new marble-like colors that he felt could compete well against the more innovative and best sellers in the U.S. market today. He then worked out a way to ship the product to anywhere in the United States at a reasonable price that would not drive up the costs. Once he had all of this in place, before setting out to find fabricators that would be willing to buy container loads of quartz and give the program a try, he made his own fabrication business the veritable guinea pig. He brought in several containers of material and began offering it as his own regional name brand, “Chesapeake Quartz.”
After refining the system and making sure all of the quality control and shipping bugs were worked out, Kruger then began to look for other fabricators that would be interested in cutting out the costs of the middleman and developing their own brand of quartz without the worry of having the rug pulled out from under them after putting in all of the hard work.
Armed with this sort of a "buyers club" idea, he found several fabricators willing to give it a go, and he said the results have been very rewarding so far with re-orders coming in from several of the early adapters already.
Being a fabricator himself, he then came up with a few additional ideas to help fabricators to get the most out of the product, including having the material made in jumbo-sized slabs that allow for fewer seams and fewer slabs to be used in a given project, thereby increasing the savings on material and labor. This was partially accomplished by having the factory leave the raw edges of the slabs intact to increase the actual dimensions of the slabs, while also lowering the labor cost to produce them. So the fabricator pays for 63- by 126-in. slab, while the actual polished dimensions are closer to 65- by 128-in.
In return for his time and effort, Kruger decided rather than jacking up the price for the slabs to make a large profit, he would take only a small cut to keep the price low and to cover his costs and the costs of producing samples for buyers. He said he sees the real profit when he fabricates the material for his customers' projects, because he is able to make a much higher margin, just like the other buyers are able to do.
He said the result is that those who buy in (including himself), must order slabs by the container load (56 3cm slabs or 84 2cm slabs per container), with up to four different colors per container. They can stock as many or as few of the colors they want and they can call it whatever they want, i.e. “Sunshine Quartz” in Florida, “Buckeye Quartz” in Ohio, “Sooner Quartz” in Oklahoma, etc. QuartzSource handles all of the shipping and customs, and include hundreds of samples as part of the service. All of the companies who buy in get the material delivered directly from the factory to their door in good order, at a low cost and on time.
Of course, this type of a program is not for everyone. Kruger's intended customers are those independent-minded companies capable of creating their own brand identities and supporting their routes to market. Also, because the company purposely avoids using local distributors, the participating fabricators must be able to plan for and maintain their own inventories to avoid shortages. But those who can handle these caveats and who seek to control their own financial destinies, may stand to see their margins increase significantly if it works as well as Kruger puts forth.
We would love to hear your opinions on this sort of a program. Do you think it could work? Are you or have you been involved in a program like this? Post a comment or drop us a line with your thoughts.
The man behind the company is Evan Kruger, the owner of Solid Tops, a fabrication company in Maryland that works with granite, quartz surfacing, solid surface, and a variety of other premium surfacing materials. I did some research and Kruger seems to have a pretty solid reputation in the industry, being one of the first fabricators to receive MIA Accreditation, one of the founders of EOS Surfaces, a past board member and president of ISFA and a founding member of the Artisan Group. Kruger is known for his industry involvement and innovation, and so it comes as little surprise that he created QuartzSource in a much different manner than most material suppliers.
In discussing the company with Kruger, he said his new business ships quality slabs directly to fabricators' doors from the manufacturer in Asia, unbranded. Yes, you read that correctly, there is no brand name associated with the product at all. The reason behind the business model, according to Kruger, is because he has seen how some fabricators have built up brand recognition for big quartz surfacing companies only to have those companies give a 30-day notice and then open their own fabrication shops or give exclusivity to another fabricator in that area and basically take the business away from the fabricators who had worked so diligently to build their brand in the first place. Kruger believes that fabricators need to have control of their own branding message if they are to regain the ground lost during the past 7 to 8 years. The “skin in the game” for Kruger is this very lack of owning his customers' brand. He said, “If I do a poor job supplying my customers, they can take their business elsewhere because they own the brand name! The customer doesn’t need to buy from me to keep his own brand intact. Therefore I need to be very diligent to serve him well and that gives my customers a lot of confidence to invest.”
When developing the idea, he started thinking about how fabricators could feel more comfortable about putting so much effort into branding a product without fear of it being taken away from them. He knew the product had to be not only free of a corporate brand, but also be of high quality and come in innovative colors that would be sell well, while being at a competitive price. That way businesses could make a good profit on a material they could then brand as their own product.
After coming up with the idea, he then needed to find a supplier that could produce to his specs at a good price. So, he went to Asia, where he had developed numerous contacts over the years, and began looking for a quality quartz product that would be available at a reasonable price.
After extensive research and development, he found a process he thought would meet his demands and tested it against some of the bigger manufacturers’ products to make sure it met or exceeded their quality. With the proper test results achieved, he worked to develop new marble-like colors that he felt could compete well against the more innovative and best sellers in the U.S. market today. He then worked out a way to ship the product to anywhere in the United States at a reasonable price that would not drive up the costs. Once he had all of this in place, before setting out to find fabricators that would be willing to buy container loads of quartz and give the program a try, he made his own fabrication business the veritable guinea pig. He brought in several containers of material and began offering it as his own regional name brand, “Chesapeake Quartz.”
After refining the system and making sure all of the quality control and shipping bugs were worked out, Kruger then began to look for other fabricators that would be interested in cutting out the costs of the middleman and developing their own brand of quartz without the worry of having the rug pulled out from under them after putting in all of the hard work.
Armed with this sort of a "buyers club" idea, he found several fabricators willing to give it a go, and he said the results have been very rewarding so far with re-orders coming in from several of the early adapters already.
Being a fabricator himself, he then came up with a few additional ideas to help fabricators to get the most out of the product, including having the material made in jumbo-sized slabs that allow for fewer seams and fewer slabs to be used in a given project, thereby increasing the savings on material and labor. This was partially accomplished by having the factory leave the raw edges of the slabs intact to increase the actual dimensions of the slabs, while also lowering the labor cost to produce them. So the fabricator pays for 63- by 126-in. slab, while the actual polished dimensions are closer to 65- by 128-in.
In return for his time and effort, Kruger decided rather than jacking up the price for the slabs to make a large profit, he would take only a small cut to keep the price low and to cover his costs and the costs of producing samples for buyers. He said he sees the real profit when he fabricates the material for his customers' projects, because he is able to make a much higher margin, just like the other buyers are able to do.
He said the result is that those who buy in (including himself), must order slabs by the container load (56 3cm slabs or 84 2cm slabs per container), with up to four different colors per container. They can stock as many or as few of the colors they want and they can call it whatever they want, i.e. “Sunshine Quartz” in Florida, “Buckeye Quartz” in Ohio, “Sooner Quartz” in Oklahoma, etc. QuartzSource handles all of the shipping and customs, and include hundreds of samples as part of the service. All of the companies who buy in get the material delivered directly from the factory to their door in good order, at a low cost and on time.
Of course, this type of a program is not for everyone. Kruger's intended customers are those independent-minded companies capable of creating their own brand identities and supporting their routes to market. Also, because the company purposely avoids using local distributors, the participating fabricators must be able to plan for and maintain their own inventories to avoid shortages. But those who can handle these caveats and who seek to control their own financial destinies, may stand to see their margins increase significantly if it works as well as Kruger puts forth.
We would love to hear your opinions on this sort of a program. Do you think it could work? Are you or have you been involved in a program like this? Post a comment or drop us a line with your thoughts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)