European Artstone, N. Hollywood, Calif.

The trip has been long, and sometimes hard, in terms of more than just geography. Because of his knowledge of English, a newly immigrated Terharutyunyan was called on to go out to work with his father, Joseph, who had done stone construction in Armenia.

After a couple years working for a tile company, the family opened its own fabrication and installation business with a small saw.

Six years later, with some key additions including two younger Terharutyunyan sons, the business began to grow in a big way.

In 2005, European Artstone moved to its current acre-and-a-half location, and expanded its business by importing mosaics. And, while the current recession caused a dip in business, Andy Terharutyunyan continues to expand his product mix, offering a couple different lines of mosaics to other distributors in Southern California – and perhaps beyond.

STEADY STEPS

The story of the Terharutyunyans and European Artstone isn’t all that different from many others family-owned businesses in the industry. It’s just that, as a boy, when Andy Terharutyunyan went out to watch his father at work, the locale was a Soviet republic, rather than Southern California.

“My father’s side of the family used to be in construction,” says Andy Terharutyunyan. “And, when I say construction, it was mainly in the stone industry. They were doing facades and building homes from stone.”

And, as with many boys in many parts of the world, the son would spend part of his school vacations learning from his father.

“I’d go help him and look at what he was doing,” Terharutyunyan says. “He taught me how to cut stone and how to lay stone.”

The role of student and teacher changed a bit when the family moved to the United States. Joseph Terharutyunyan didn’t know English, and his son had to lend a hand.

Andy Terharutyunyan explains that school officials also decided, since he was 18, that he shouldn’t be attending high school, and he found himself attending college while trying to work with his father setting tile.

“I went to college for about a year-and-a-half, but I had to help support my family and my father, just to keep up,” he says. “At that point, I left college and we started our own business.”

They opened their own operation in 1992 with a small saw in 800 ft², with Andy Terharutyunyan cutting slabs for countertops and vanities and Joseph Terharutyunyan installing them. By 1998, the company was ready to expand, moving into a 2,200 ft² space, adding brothers Steve and Harry, and hiring its first employees.

“We wanted more capacity,” says Andy Terharutyunyan. “We purchased a couple automatic edging machines and, with the skilled employees, I started getting better jobs and bigger jobs.”

Two years later, the company incorporated and moved into 7,000 ft².

“With the power of three brothers, we just were getting bigger and bigger jobs,” says Andy Terharutyunyan. “We started getting very detail- and design-oriented jobs, and we bought a waterjet to cut intricate designs.”

European Artstone moved to its current location in 2005, and Andy Terharutyunyan says he wasn’t initially happy with the idea of moving from the Glendale-Burbank area to North Hollywood. Only the property itself (and the need for yet more space) convinced him to relocate the business.

“There’s so much competition here,” he says. “You can drive on any street and everybody is selling stone or fabricating it. But, I wanted to expand, and this place was a big slab yard that the owners were moving to Castiac, Calif. Even now, I have people come in and ask for that company, and we sell them materials.”

That little extra business aside, Terharutyunyan explains that his present location allowed him to do both remodeling and new construction to make things the way he wanted them. The company has new offices, a new showroom and plenty of warehouse space for both slabs and mosaics – not to mention room for its equipment, which with the move grew to include a Northwood CNC production center.

THE RIGHT STUFF

There’s no question that Andy Terharutyunyan is proud of European Artstone’s current location. The company has put a lot of time and money into having just the right facility for its mix of fabrication and installation, slabs and mosaics.

“We have four buildings,” he explains. “The first building is our office building, and it’s state-of-the-art and very modern. It was a very small and dark office building that you wouldn’t want to go to. We redesigned everything; now it’s very light, with open ceilings and glass partitions.”

The second building is the company’s showroom; at almost 4,500 ft², it includes plenty of room for displays and samples of the company’s products, which include an array of natural stone, several quartz lines (with an emphasis on CaesarStone®, Silestone® and Cambria®) and porcelain and mosaic tiles.

“A large part of our business in the last four years has been with quartz,” Terharutyunyan says. “We’re selling almost a container a month of CaesarStone, and we’re one of their biggest distributors. We do a lot of kitchen countertops for kitchen and bath dealers from CaesarStone.”

The mosaics are another part of the business for which Terharutyunyan holds high expectations. The company began importing mosaics from China with the move to the North Hollywood location,; more recently, he’s started creating his own designs.

“We do a lot of custom homes with custom designs and so this seemed like a good idea,” Terharutyunyan says. “Now, I’m designing my own mosaics and they’re making them for me in China, then sending them in my own boxes.”

It’s quite a competitive market, he adds. When he sees someone doing something similar, he moves ahead and creates something else. However, it’s also a market that Terharutyunyan has enough confidence in that he’s in the process of starting to wholesale his designs to other shops around Southern California with a goal of eventually taking the line nationwide.

Not that Terharutyunyan will be doing all the work himself on that. He’s brought in a friend to handle the distribution, and the effort is also providing work for Joseph Terharutyunyan, who first retired at the urging of his sons about six years ago.

“He doesn’t like staying home,” says Andy Terharutyunyan of his father. “He used to come and go, but now he’s helping us design and make sample boards for our wholesale customer base.”

The creative side of the mosaics is important to Terharutyunyan. He has always enjoyed working with customers on design issues, and he’s already thinking about yet another custom mosaic line that would be waterjet-cut and appeal to clients willing to spend a little bit more for their bathroom floors and walls.

However, he stresses he’s happy to come up with the ideas and leave the execution to others.

“I really should concentrate on my stone fabrication,” he says, adding that it’s still European Artstone’s bread-and-butter.

Today, Terharutyunyan believes his company can handle just about anything that can be imagined in stone. That means not just countertops, but fireplaces, outdoor kitchens, steps, furniture and even custom moldings. And, he’s doing it for a varied customer base, starting with developers and their contractors.

“We do a lot of work for developers with large numbers of units,” he says. “We do both countertops and tile for them. Then, we work with contractors who do custom homes. We do a lot of countertops for cabinet companies and kitchen-and-bath shops. And, because of our showroom, we’re starting to get some designers bringing their clients in to get materials and talk about our services.”

FABRICATING SUCCESS

Talk has always been a critical part of European Artstone’s marketing plan. Early on, the company relied almost entirely on word-of-mouth from satisfied customers, and Andy Terharutyunyan says he’s still getting referrals from clients the family served in the early 1990s.

By comparison, he says efforts at newspaper and television advertising – even on the local Armenian cable channel – have generally fallen flat.

Instead, he relies on his three person showroom staff – including a Terharutyunyan cousin (Jack) who shares marketing responsibilities with Andy’s younger brother Harry and Karina Barseghian. (Steve Terharutyunyan serves as the company’s chief financial officer.)

“They do a very good job of going out and calling on people and getting us new business,” says the company president. “They’re out making contacts with contractors and different shops that use our products. Every day we try to bring in new business.”

Of course, good word-of-mouth also depends on having great products and first-rate installation. The other two buildings on the European Artstone site help ensure that. One is a warehouse that allows the company to keep its more-delicate stones and its boxed products under cover.

Then, there’s the 8,000 ft² fabrication shop, which currently employs approximately 20 people, including on-staff engineers and draftsmen for the jobs that require that level of expertise.

Many do. For instance, Terharutyunyan explains that the CNC production center was purchased for one particular job.

“It was a job we did in Westlake Village that included a hotel and spa,” he explains. “We used between 100 and 150 slabs on that job – all with intricate edge-detailing for countertops.”

Regardless of the size of the job, Terharutyunyan says the emphasis is on providing a quality experience from start to finish.

“We go out of our way to make our customers happy,” he says. “Quality service and customer happiness are all that matters, even if I lose money on a particular job. I like to think it’s the personal attention that all our employees give to customers, so that each one feels special.”

The staff doesn’t give a second thought to letting people touch products in the showroom, or pulling slabs to make sure each person gets just the right one. One of Terharutyunyan’s particular sources of pride is showing off the shop, which he says is as clean as many showrooms he’s visited.

“That’s something I got from my mother,” he says. “Our facility is almost dust-free because of the equipment, and the scraps have to go into a leftover rack so there aren’t small pieces lying around. Everything has to be clean.”

Installations are handled by a crew of approximately 30, and while the company doesn’t install commercial tile jobs – “with my capacity, I can’t afford it; I supply tile,” Terharutyunyan says – part of the service European Artstone offers is being able to do residential tile work.

Terharutyunyan acknowledges that part of his success is also due to his preference to hire – and keep – good employees. Many on the staff have been with him since the 2005 move, and a few have been at the company for a decade or more.

“That’s one of the reasons my costs are a little higher,” he says. “I don’t hire and fire, because if you do that, your costs stay down – but you don’t get the quality of workmanship you get with people who know you and know how you want the job done. I’m very happy with my employees.”

Instead, Terharutyunyan is keeping his installers busy and his costs down by importing prefabricated tops from China for some commercial jobs, a direction he says he didn’t want to take.

“It was a very hard decision for me to make, because it kills our fabrication business,” he says. “However, we have to survive until we see what’s going to happen with the economy.”

In the interim, Terharutyunyan is excited about his efforts to move his made-in-China line of mosaics into tile, and kitchen and bath showrooms around the area, and confident the custom waterjet-cut designs will do well.

“There are some big decisions we have to make, but they’re coming,” he says. “This is a very big venture for me. We want to do something new, and we want to be the first doing something new in the market.”

Despite the recent declines in the market, he adds that European Artstone is definitely in business for the long run.

“Our greatest success has always been in making the stone look beautiful in the customer’s home,” he concludes. “I love stone, and I believe that whatever is possible in the customer’s imagination, we can do it in stone. As much as we can, we’re going to keep providing new products and better service to them.”

©2010 Western Business Media Inc.