Westwood Tile & Stone, Cherry Hill, N.J.

December 5, 2002

CHERRY HILL, N.J. – Steve and Linda Stelmaszyk always had an idea that they could do something a little better by doing it themselves. And, after more than a quarter century in business, the continued growth of Westwood Tile & Stone makes it hard to argue the point.
After working in general contracting for a couple years in the early 1970s, Steve Stelmaszyk felt he should be working for himself. However, both Stelmaszyks saw their best option as finding a specialty niche, and they wanted an upscale product. Tile seemed to fit the bill, and with a few tools, a truck and partner Ric Seraydarian, Westwood Tile was born in Westmont, N.J., in 1975.
The choice proved to be an excellent one. In the years that followed, the number of tile manufacturers grew tremendously, and the product became a popular upgrade for floors, kitchens and bathrooms. When their customers began asking for natural stone, the Stelmaszyks added it – first by doing the installations, and later adding fabrication.
Today, Westwood does more stone work than tile, employing more than 40 people at its Cherry Hill facility … including 20 people divided into two shifts in the fabrication shop. Technology continues to help take the company into new markets, and if the couple has a concern, it’s that they’ll grow too large to give each job the attention it deserves.

UPSCALE UPGRADES
Make no mistake about it: Linda and Steve Stelmaszyk are partners in life and in business. They each have their areas of expertise – Steve in production and engineering, Linda in sales and marketing – although she doesn’t mind joking, “We each have our own building; that helps a lot.”
Her husband is quick to add that he can even remember a time before they mostly talked about business.
“Then, we talked about school,” he says.
Both Stelmaszyks are natives of the Cherry Hill, N.J., area. They began dating while attending a local Catholic high school. After graduating in 1969, Steve Stelmaszyk attended the Camden campus of Rutgers University for two years before being drafted into the army.
Following her own graduation in 1970, Linda Stelmaszyk also enrolled at Rutgers and attended classes there before the couple married following Steve Stelmaszyk’s discharge in 1973.
As with many other newlyweds, school gave way to the reality of making a living. By that time, Linda Stelmaszyk was already working for a civil engineering firm, and Steve Stelmaszyk resumed working for a general contractor.
After a couple years working for someone else, Steve Stelmaszyk felt ready to move into working for himself. By then, the couple had come to some important realizations.
One was that ceramic tile was poised to make the transition that’s now occurring with natural stone. Instead of being a product available from a small number of manufacturers and installed by a few craftsmen, it was ready to boom.
“We found that, although it was a niche market, it was becoming more and more popular,” says Linda Stelmaszyk. “It was also a product that was starting to be considered as an upgrade, which gives the ability to charge for the type of work that we wanted to do.”
Rather than just selling and installing a product, they wanted to do a first-rate job for those people looking for upgrades, with the idea that they could charge upscale prices, as well.
“We’re talking about situations where the client says, ‘Well, I’d like that with a different border’ or, ‘That’s not quite the color I was looking for’ or, ‘Let me choose the grout,’” Steve Stelmaszyk says. “Once you start to become proficient at it, you ask those questions when the customer first walks through the door, and you charge for it, or you’re out of business.”
And, he says, once the customers know you can supply those little extras, they’re willing to pay more.
Armed with their idea, his tools and partner Seraydarian, the installer became an entrepreneur. Business at first was modest – Linda Stelmaszyk kept her job with the civil engineers until 1979 – but by 1986, the company grew to the point of purchasing three acres in Cherry Hill and erecting two structures totaling 20,000 ft² of covered space.
Fueling the growth – at least in part – was the fact that the tile boom the pair had recognized in the mid-1970s was repeating itself in stone.
“Our clients became more attuned to the idea that they didn’t have to buy from a sample board, but that they could walk into a design center and get whatever they wanted,” Steve Stelmaszyk says. “They started taking the same approach with countertops and vanities. They started selecting marble and other materials and they’d say, ‘Can you install this for us?’ From there, we slowly began doing installations and templating for clients.”
The situation was not ideal, however. At times, the company was using as many as three different fabricators in the Philadelphia area and, inevitably, problems arose. Steve Stelmaszyk mentions sinks cut upside down and incorrect edge profiles. Worse, he says the fabricators didn’t want to correct their errors.
Ultimately, the couple decided that if Westwood was going to sell the quality product they wanted, they would have to control the process from the beginning.

GOLDEN TOUCH
As with so many of the Stelmaszyks decisions, adding fabrication definitely paid off. Today, the company sells more granite than its tile operations (which is still managed by Seraydarian), and it’s allowed Westwood to continue honing in on its preferred customer base: higher-end residential projects.
That’s not to say the firm is selling one kitchen at a time. Depending on how you define it, Steve Stelmaszyk says a lot of the work is really more commercial, although the end-users are homeowners.
“If you’re talking volume, we’re more residential-oriented,” he says. “However, we also have some commercial accounts where we’ve done water-jetting and complex inlays, or custom granite counters for restaurants. That’s commercial, but it’s also a one-off type of product.”
Fortunately, Linda Stelmaszyk adds, the housing market in their primary area – New Jersey, Delaware and eastern Pennsylvania – has remained strong, and while granite countertops are still seen by many builders as an extra, “at the higher end everybody seems to be taking the upgrade.”
Her husband adds that at least two developers with whom they’re working right now have adopted granite countertops as the standard in their model homes.
While Westwood has two sales reps to call on kitchen dealers and builders, the quality of the company’s work is allowing for expansion well beyond the tri-state area. In one recent instance, he says a local distributor expanding into metropolitan Washington area had the company install six full kitchens in a large showroom in Columbia, Md. In another, the company’s work on a hotel near Cherry Hill led the owner to hire Westwood to do the custom stonework for a Boston restaurant.
“When there’s an account that values us and we’ve had a good working relationship with them, and they’re willing to pay for putting the men up and the other additional costs, we’ll take a second look and often do those types of projects,” Stelmaszyk says. One recent job, he adds, wound up in Aspen, Colo.
Yet another out-of-the-ordinary account Westwood has taken on is doing custom granite countertops and floor tiles for an East Coast yacht manufacturer.
“The boat is pretty much designed on the drafting board,” says Steve Stelmaszyk. “They send us a file electronically, we’re cutting the job on the waterjet, and then shipping it to them for their installers to put in.”
In that case, the company’s owner had tried working with a couple other fabricators, but became acquainted with Westwood when the firm did some work on his home.
Steve Stelmaszyk calls the waterjet – which was added to the company’s bridge saws, heavy-lifting cranes and radial-arm polisher three years ago – probably the best investment Westwood has made. He also says it was a radical right turn for the business in terms of direction, since until then a lot of the unusual curve details were cut by hand.
“Once we had so many sink holes, so many curves and so many details, we needed something that gave us consistency in the cut,” he says. “By digitizing the work and using the waterjet, it’s enabled us to do larger pieces with custom shapes and to store the information in our files so we can repeat a particular shape again and again.”
For instance, Linda Stelmaszyk says now all the sink manufacturers provide the company with CAD files to do the cuts for their particular models.
“It really offers a lot of consistency,” she reiterates.
While consistency is a good thing when it comes to floor tiles or sink holes, the higher-end nature of Westwood’s clientele has driven the firm way beyond the typical granites and marbles when it comes to the types of stone the company offers.
The Stelmaszyks advertise that they offer semi-precious stones as well, and the couple tries to keep some of the onyxs and other hard stones on hand.
“We just did a shower in lapis lazuli,” says Steve Stelmaszyk. “We also offer Bahia blue – which is one of the most-costly granites – and some of the other hard stones, such as serpentine-type marbles that act like granite but have the beauty of marble. Some of our clients have begun using those for kitchen counters and in other areas.”
However, because the company is so customer-driven, a recent addition has been CaesarStone®. Linda Stelmaszyk says the decision to go with the engineered stone was based on customers’ constant interest in something new.
“Most of the time, our customers are interested in it because it offers colors that are not available in natural stone,” she says. “It has its drawbacks, and it’s certainly not like granite, but it’s a good product for countertops and it has its place.”

SUPPLYING THE CUSTOMER
That emphasis on customer needs and wants is really what has driven Westwood Tile & Stone from its modest beginnings to today’s success.
“You need to service the customer,” Steve Stelmaszyk says. “Your customer really dictates what product you’re going to produce or what service you’re going to offer. I’ve always believed that you perform the service or your competitor will.”
Because they’re in a position to supply quality products and services, the Stelmaszyks believe they have had little difficulty finding people who are willing to pay for what they offer. But, they stress, there is a price to be paid – on both ends.
“That’s why we don’t use subcontractors,” Steve Stelmaszyk says. “Whether it’s in fabrication or a templating crew or the installers, it’s our crew. If there’s somebody purchasing material, it’s one of us here who’s made the decision.
“Of course, there are costs associated with maintaining that level of personnel,” he adds. “But, if there’s a problem, the customer knows who to contact. You’re looking at them and talking to them.”
“Fortunately, we have a very strong management team that’s been with the company for the better part of the years we’ve been in business,” Linda Stelmaszyk adds. “It includes Steve and I and four other people who have been here a long time. Between us, we manage to serve the needs of our customers and work out the problems they might have.”
If there’s one thing the couple fears, it’s that Westwood will reach a point where the company is no longer able to offer the level of service they want their customers to have.
“Especially from a fabrication end, I believe shops can only be so large or they’re going to lose touch with the individual clients they service,” says Steve Stelmaszyk. “I believe the size of the shop can only grow to a certain point, and then you need to open another shop because you become too mass-production-oriented. You don’t have enough individuals who can talk to each client and get the specific details that person wants.”
For now, that doesn’t seem to be a likely problem for the couple. Although they’re seeing some growth in their chosen markets, Linda Stelmaszyk believes the firm is pretty stable in terms of products and equipment for now.
“We do have some production capacity available to us in the shop,” she says. “We could, for instance, add a third crew if we wanted to work around the clock.”
However, for now the need isn’t there; nor are the Stelmaszyks interested in addressing the management complications such a move would create.
In the long term, though, they’re definitely looking at different options, including what Linda Stelmaszyk characterizes as satellite offices.
“We could keep our main production here in New Jersey,” she says. “Those other sites might provide showrooms, installation and templating, and then feed the fabrication back here. That way, we could control it and still get the best use out of our equipment investment.”
If and when that happens, it’s very likely all the bugs will have been worked out, and those extra locations will offer the same quality products and service Westwood is known for.
Or, as Steve Stelmaszyk puts it, “The old ideas still work. We want to make sure that every customer leaves happy.”