Western Tile and Marble, Bellevue, Wash.

February 6, 2006

However, there’s a personal quality to the business when you talk with members of the Simone family, who’ve owned the operation since the early 1970s. Father Rudy Simone began life as a general contractor, and the concept that personal relationships count still forms the basis of Western Tile’s business philosophy.
Rudy’s son, Dino Simone, is now company president, aided by brother Ronnie, who serves as head of Western Tile’s residential division. For them, the emphasis remains on taking care of both customers and employees.
While they’re not discounting the idea of further growth, especially in the residential division, the Simone brothers are committed to doing it the right way, with first-rate products and better communication … so that their customers are happy to tell their friends their work was done by Western Tile and Marble.
Because, you’re only as good as your reputation.

NATURAL EXPANSION
Rudy Simone’s involvement in Western Tile came through lending a hand to some friends. For the first 15 years under his ownership, it wasn’t even his primary business.
Dino Simone explains that his father’s main company for many years was Simone Construction. However, he was a friend of the owners of Western Tile.
In the early 1970s, when the company ran into financial difficulties, he took it over and restructured it. “At that point, it was primarily a commercial tile-contracting company,” Dino Simone explains.
It might have even stayed that way had it not been for Dino Simone. Although the senior Simone was quite successful with his contractor work, including building budget motels in 26 states, Dino Simone and another brother (who no longer works for the company) opted to work for Western Tile instead.
Dino Simone explains they were interested in building up the subcontracting side of Western Tile. Then, in 1985, they saw an opportunity to expand beyond the tile business.
“We were doing a lot of large projects, and one of the jobs that came up involved not only a lot of ceramic tile, but also a lot of natural stone,” Dino Simone explains. “It was a French limestone; even though it was cut-to-size, it was going to require some fabrication after it arrived.”
Realizing they could either hire the fabrication out or do it themselves, the Simone brothers opted to educate themselves in stone and opened a fabrication shop.
“We started in, like, 2,000 ft² with a saw and a polisher,” says Dino Simone. “We started small, and like a lot of fabricators at the time, we were doing everything by hand. It was a dirty, dusty environment.”
From that modest beginning, Western Tile’s involvement in natural stone kept expanding. Because of its involvement with commercial construction, the company offers exterior cladding, and has a division devoted strictly to that side of natural stone.
“That’s grown in this market, and we’ve ended up doing a lot of large downtown office buildings,” says Dino Simone.
Cladding aside, much of the company’s stonework – Simone estimates about 75 percent by volume – remains devoted to the commercial market. However, growing demand has also led Western Tile to do more residential work.
“Strangely enough, our first residential job was for furniture,” says Simone. “From there it’s progressed into tub surrounds and kitchen countertops and a lot of custom work. It’s just naturally expanded.”

TAPPING THE MARKETS
Perhaps not quite as natural is Western Tile’s expansion into the Las Vegas market, although it’s worth noting that Rudy Simone built his business doing work all around the western United States.
The company opened a separate facility in Las Vegas in the early 1990s, and Dino Simone says the simple reason for the expansion is that the family wanted to tap into the building boom there.
“Somebody mentioned Vegas to us, so we went down and checked it out,” he explains. “Mark Fenstermaker, who helped us open our facility there is still with us, but his first day in business there he was sitting on the floor cranking out bids because his furniture hadn’t arrived.”
While the firm’s Las Vegas facility is comparable in size and equipment to the current 30,000 ft² Bellevue production shop, it lacks a showroom because it doesn’t sell to the residential market.
“They do very custom work there, with a lot of ornate edge details,” Simone says. “It’s very labor-intensive.”
The casinos are Western Tile’s best Las Vegas customers. The company is involved in the vanities and countertops that go into hotel rooms, although – as with most of its other commercial work – those jobs are typically cut-to-size and imported from fabricators in China, Italy and other locations.
“Some Las Vegas projects are exceptions to that, due to short lead times,” he says. “Where we do custom fabrication is in the main public areas of the casinos, the restaurants and so forth. There we bring in the slabs and do the work ourselves.”
Along with the usual marbles, granites and travertines, Western Tile advertises its skill working with higher-end materials. And, while Simone says the Bellevue operation will occasionally be called on to fabricate and install a stone such as onyx in a higher-end residence there, there’s plenty of demand for such work in Vegas.
“Onyx is used in the high-end suites in the casinos,” he says. “These are the rooms the public never sees, but we use a lot of it in those applications.”
Western Tile has also gotten into the natural-quartz market, becoming a distributor for Cosentino USA’s Silestone®. The company quickly expanded that part of its product mix during a time it filled orders for Silestone from Home Depots in the Seattle area.
Although Western Tile is no longer fabricating for the home-supply chain, Simone says he’s impressed with both Cosentino and the natural-quartz product.
“We’re busy strengthening that relationship,” he says. “Cosentino has grown something like ten-fold.”
Simone estimates that currently about 60 percent of the work the Bellevue fabrication facility turns out is natural stone, with the remainder being Silestone. And, he says, natural stone has taken that lead strictly because of the end of the relationship with Home Depot.

STRONG RELATIONSHIPS
The man most responsible for seeing that all the jobs get out the door of the Bellevue plant is Dino Simone’s brother, Ronnie, who heads up the company’s residential division and oversees the fabrication shop.
Ronnie Simone joined the company in 1990 after working outside the family’s business for a few years. He says in the 16 years he’s been with Western Tile, he’s helped move the fabrication shop three times.
“Today, we’re averaging about 180 kitchens a month,” he says. “We’re very interested in pursuing high-end residential work, but we also have our dealer/builder operation and we cater to production homes with both granite and Silestone.”
To get the work done, the shop runs two shifts, and Ronnie Simone has a staff of 42 people to run the machines, do field measurements, and handle residential installations. The residential division also includes 20 tile setters, and both brothers stress that tile remains an important part of Western Tile and Marble, with many designers and builders integrating stone and tile in the same projects.
The company also runs a full compliment of high-end production equipment including two FOMA saws, a waterjet from Flow International Corp., edge profilers from Denver S.A., Marmo Meccanica, and Comandulli, and two Z. Bavelloni S.p.A. CNC machines.
Complimenting the production facility is what Ronnie Simone calls, “a beautiful showroom,” that allows residential customers to come in and shop for their stone. Unlike the commercial division, he says Western Tile has only recently begun importing its own stone.
“I probably could have been doing it for the last 10 years, but we’ve elected not to,” he says. “We pay a little more for the stone we buy, but we know we’re going to get the right color and it will be a good stone. Sometimes you can get a great price on something, but nobody’s going to buy it.”
Being able to offer customers good, attractive stone is important, Ronnie Simone adds, because so much of the business is built on word-of-mouth.
“We seem to get involved in a lot of jobs based on our past reputation and experience,” he says. “We’ve been around so long that we really have a reputation and we’ve developed a lot of relationships with contractors, designers and architects.”
Those relationships are such that often times residential stone buyers will rely on Western Tile to suggest contractors for their projects. And, both Simone brothers add that at this point their company’s reputation is further enhanced by the relationships developed by its project managers, many of whom have been with the firm for more than a decade.
“They’ve established their own relationships and the contractors they’ve worked with continue to come back and talk with them and request pricing and bids,” says Ronnie Simone.
In fact, Dino Simone says it’s the project managers and estimators in both the Bellevue and Las Vegas facilities that help keep things going. The company’s success has been built on having great employees and not looking to be the low bidder on every job.
While he recognizes the idea of taking care of your customers and your employees is something of a cliché, Dino Simone adds that it’s really the basis for the company’s business philosophy.
“We have a good reputation for doing our work correctly,” he says. “The people we have here are also very relationship-oriented. We want to know whom we’re working for. We look for reputable contractors and owners to work for.”
It’s probably not surprising, that Western Tile is in the midst of upgrading its computer network and improving communications with customers to handle what the brothers believe will be continued growth for their company.
One area where some of that will come is in the residential side of the market, since the company has just signed on to be a sponsor for the Seattle area’s Street of Dreams home showcase.
“We’re hoping to line up with at least a couple different builders and do work in as many of the homes as we can get into,” says Ronnie Simone. “We want to do some entire homes – bathrooms, flooring, slab countertops and exterior walkways. Our intention is to use this to expand the residential division and add some project managers.”
Despite the company’s past success and its evolution from tile contractor through the addition of natural stone to the product mix in its various iterations, the Simone brothers say Western Tile is a work in progress. However, they definitely have no regrets about making stone the focal point of the business.
“Even though that (first) countertop we sold for $120 a square foot is now going for $50 a foot, our focus remains natural stone, and that’s the reputation we want,” Dino Simone concludes.