Counter Effect

April 5, 2005

…. Except that this is the wrong time of the year. The stone shows are here in the fall, right? So how’s this happening in early March?
One answer is that it could be too many free drinks at the slot machines, except that cocktail servers pay little attention to people hanging around the nickel machines. No, it’s reality, and a part of the business that’s not going to go away – no matter how hard anybody tries to ignore it.
The show that brought a good stone crowd together happened to be the Solid Surface International Expo. And, no, attendees didn’t have the same selection of materials and fabrication products that they’d see at any of the other stone-related shows set for this year.
They could find enough, though, from CNC machines to tooling to sinks and, in a couple of places, stone suppliers. And, of course, any number of booths had the other stuff.
We can pull all the names out of the bag, good and bad. Solid surface. Composite. Agglomerate. Ersatz. Plastic. Fake.
The folks in the booths and walking the aisles, however, seemed to have another name in mind: countertops. That’s because it’s the same term they hear from most of their residential and retail customers, and the people at this show are listening.
For years, it’s been easy to poke some less-than-good-natured fun at those who aren’t working with straight-from-the-earth quarried stone. Some of the products that claimed to be like stone had as much in common as Ritz® crackers with the Ritz-Carlton; whatever it looked like, it didn’t look like stone.
As the popularity of granite, marble and then natural-quartz surfaces began to grow, though, solid-surface manufacturers and fabricators noticed the dent in sales. Solid-surface materials still far outsell the harder, natural-based surfaces, but any kind of drop is felt in this very competitive part of the trade.
Have they perfected something that’s exactly like stone that isn’t really stone. Well, no … but they’re still trying. And, they’re getting better.
Hudson Surfaces, for example, rolled out its NATURAL line that isn’t going to fool a deep-in-the-vein stonehead – but you’ll stop to give a second look at slab-like pieces with chiseled edges. Eos Solutions offered a 3cm material that can stand up to any CNC tooling. Others showed materials that looked a lot-less cookie-cutter and more like the natural imperfection that’s key to stone’s appeal.
The solid-surface crowd couldn’t get enough of this kind of product. For them, it’s a way to compete without taking the big step to grinding granite.
It’s not that these fabricators hate stone and see all these slabs rolling into the country as some kind of evil plot. For them, it’s a matter of production cost; one of the big obstacles is the six-figure price tag of retooling their shops to take on stone (and learning, after shattering their fourth granite slab in a row, that even more challenges await in production).
Some of the customers for the new material also might be a surprise; standard stone shops also took a keen interest as well. If it can be fabricated like stone, it’s another product to put in the mix without seriously disturbing shop workflow if customers (especially the large-volume type, such as developers) balk at granite or quartz prices.
Other stone fabricators also took a hard look at the show’s quartz-surfaces vendors, where the field’s getting more crowded every year. Formica Corp. and Korea’s Hanwha added their names to the list, and another large name in solid-surface materials is still mulling over a possible new quartz line.
It’s a sector that’s continuing to build steam, fueled by one company that didn’t even appear at the Solid Surface shindig. Cosentino’s Silestone literally upped the ante away from Las Vegas by dropping a 30-second ad into the high visibility of the two-minute warning break of the first half of this year’s Super Bowl telecast. Seeing basketball bad-boy Dennis Rodman in a bubble bath stating, “I am Diana Pearl” may not be the usual way to sell a bathroom remodel job, but it represented a $3.4-million shot into American homes.
Arguments on solid-surface, natural-quartz, granite and marble fill pages of online forums at Websites; however, that’s not the point of discussion here. What’s important is that multimillion advertising buys and the thrust of other materials is to get into the buying mind of homeowners, because that’s where the stone battles are being fought now and in the near future.
The huge gains made in stone consumption in the past ten years – as documented by the incredible increase in imports – are fueled by one market: residential. More than one million metric tons of granite (and loads of marble and travertine) didn’t come through U.S. ports last year to mainly go into stunning architectural wonders and commercial cladding projects. Track a slab from importation to installation, and chances are better than even money the material went into a new home or a remodel.
What’s happening in the solid-surface world isn’t just a trade trying to catch up to what the stone industry has to offer. While they’re concerned about presentation, they’re also dialed in on where the product’s really going and who’s buying it. And that’s a rock-solid concept we all need to remember.