Stone Interiors began operations in July of 1997. The owners have over 63 years of experience in Stone fabrication and installation, specializing in marble, granite, quartzite, and engineered quartz. After 20 years in business, we have expertly installed over 50,000 jobs. We now own and operate three showrooms in South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana.
But the savviest of smart entrepreneurs will add, “Only if you know how to use it.” In this story, Duane Naquin, owner of Stone Interiors in Gaston, South Carolina, shares his blueprint for success in the countertop business.
“I’m a second-generation fabricator, and while I am the owner of Stone Interiors, it’s the second company my father and I have owned together,“ said Duane.
Duane’s father is G.K. Naquin, one of the co-founders of Intrepid Enterprises, which started in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1972. “Intrepid was the largest high-rise granite company in the country during the 1980s,” continued Duane. “When he sold out of the company in 1997, he immediately started Stone Interiors in Loxley, Alabama. After I graduated from college in 2001, I did some research to decide where we would open our second location, and picked Columbia, South Carolina.”
By 2007, Stone Interiors was grossing around $ 6 million per year, but beginning in 2008 and through the years of recession that followed, revenue fell to about $2 million per year.
“Initially, we were founded as a purely wholesale company,” explained Duane. “We never dealt with any builders or retail directly, but during the recession, the way we had to do business changed. Today, about 40 percent of our business is servicing big-box stores, 40 percent is to builders directly, and 20 percent is retail direct. We serve all of South Carolina, Metro Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Augusta, Georgia, market, offering a wide array of granite, marble, engineered stone, wood, and stainless steel. Fortunately, this year, we’ll probably do somewhere around $6 million again. So we’ve really come full circle and are looking to expand beyond that.”
The facility is situated on nine acres. A good portion of the property is wooded, making it a peaceful place for customers to visit. Duane explained, “We are in an industrial area outside of town, and our customers don’t see any of the neighboring places around us. We have a dedicated area for customers to safely view our over 1,000 in-stock slabs. Moreover, we have a large party tent to display our Luxury Collection of about 25 exotic materials we import, making them easy to view. We don’t have to flip through them or show the edge of a slab. They can see full front views of all those materials. We stock these luxury materials and sell them by the square foot.”
Customers can also take advantage of various programs that help move remnants. “We’ve got some good package deals when customers are buying a kitchen, so they’re offered a great deal to have us do their vanities, too. That helps move those remnants through.”
Stone Interiors regularly purchases materials from six different international suppliers and from 12 domestic wholesalers, explained Duane. “Typically, my wife Heather and I try to go to Brazil every other year to look for something new and different. She works here and handles much of the buying. This is where the whole idea of the luxury collection came from, when we were visiting Antolini Luigi’s Brazilian warehouse. We walked into this beautiful building, looking at all this stone and thinking, “Hmm, this is what we need to do.” So we’ve made ourselves sort of a mini Antolini’s here. We also work with an agent that inspects our containers before they leave Brazil. That way we’ve got eyes on each container load.”
Stone Interiors currently employs 46 talented people. The shop, said Duane, is normally staffed by eight to ten workers, depending on whether they have to add an extra person or two to their five installation crews or two measuring crews.
The showroom is staffed with five internal salespeople and four outside salespeople who service builder and retail accounts, while three additional staff members handle the company’s processing and billing for big-box accounts. All are fully equipped to sit down with a customer and their designer to help flesh out a custom design, according to Duane. “These are the kinds of things that we really specialize in. Our employees are by far the best in the industry. We’ve been at this location for 15 years, and we’ve got four people who have been with us from the first days, and many more have been with us for over 10 years.”
The building has a total footprint of 20,000 square feet, with 16,000 square feet dedicated to the shop, 2,500 square feet for office space, and 1,500 square feet for the showroom. From the beginning, Stone Interiors has been a Marmo Meccanica shop, said Duane. “We brought in some of the first Marmo machines back in the early 1990s, and we’ve been hooked on them ever since. When we first set up, we had a Marmo bridge saw and their 711 and 522 Edge Polishers. Over time, we got another bridge saw, a Denver from Vic Industrial. We also have an Intermac Master 43 CNC machine.”
If it’s ogee, triple pencil, or specialty edges, it is done on the CNC, but 90 percent of their work is still straight runs and more suited to line polishers, he explained. “We prioritize what goes through the CNC because we want it running at full capacity. It handles all the specialty edges, curves, and sink cutouts. But all of our flat edge work still runs through our edge polishers — they still run circles around a CNC for straight edges. Last year, when we bought the robot (saw), we moved the original Marmo saw and put the robot in its place.”
The Kuka robot mentioned is a part of a BACA Systems machine. When first purchased, Duane also invested in an extra photo workstation to assist customers in slab layout. “All of our luxury slabs are photographed and pre-matched for our customers to view and experiment with layouts. As for the robotic arm, it’s been working great. We still have the same kind of waterjet maintenance as everyone else, but in terms of precision, speed, maintenance, and reliability, the BACA is unparalleled. It has basically taken over everything we were doing on both bridge saws, with excess capacity beyond that.
We were already running a CNC and shooting (laser) template files digitally and using CAD systems. So if you’re already using laser and CAD, the robot is easy to integrate. However, if you’re going straight from stick templates to learning CAD and everything else in the process, then I’m sure you’d have a little steeper curve. Before the robot, we could still cut by hand or by bridge saw, but now there is no reason not to take measurements with a laser.”
“When we built this facility, we constructed our own recycling system,” continued Duane, “So we are able to run gray water and clean water through our closed-loop system based on the requirements of each piece of equipment. Moreover, as an accredited company, we must participate in the OSHA voluntary program every year. We’ve got our safety schedule set up with what needs to happen, such as our monthly safety meetings and daily equipment inspections. We also do annual hearing and pulmonary function tests, drug tests, and driver safety tests, all of those things.
At one point, he had more than 600 employees, and their safety programs were very robust corporate policies and programs. When he left that world and entered this one, safety naturally came with him. So we tend to be pretty stringent in this area. That corporate structure is also why we’ve been so successful. Many small companies know how to fabricate, but don’t know how to run a business, and that’s what dooms them.
“So being able to run a business is what truly makes you successful in our industry.”
Stone Interiors has an in-house marketing person who’s been with them for about a year, working on unifying their message. Additionally, they advertise on the radio, in various publications, and at local home shows.
“Our booth is more than just sample racks of materials that we stock. It is a kitchen set up with a TV playing a video and a sofa where they can sit, have a coffee, and talk about what they want to do. But the gist of our marketing is to get them to come here and experience what we have to show. Everything we are trying to do and build around is the (experience) of buying stone as opposed to the (transaction) of buying.”
Duane continued, “One of our biggest customers is a high-end designer here in town. She uses us because we can help her. She comes up with designs, has a clear image of what she wants, and knows we’ll help her make it a reality. With our technical expertise, we’ll design and explain what’s needed to achieve what she is looking for. That’s what we specialize in. Anybody can throw in a $ 30-per-foot countertop, but it takes a whole other level of expertise and professionalism to design, implement, and execute many higher-end projects. Many designers have gone out and failed to get what they want with other companies, and then come back to us. So this is where we have really been able to perform where others have failed, and the kind of thing that separates the true craftsman from the guys who go from job to job, offering poor quality.
“In the same context, the thing we find, though, is that when you get into a lot of the specialized companies that do have the expertise, they’re mostly smaller companies with top craftsmen. We are a fairly large-scale shop that’s able to function with that high level of quality, running over 10,000 feet a month of finished jobs through our shop.”
So what makes Stone Interiors unique? “I think it comes down to one simple thing that has many parts, and that’s customer service,” Duane replied. “We understand that people have a choice of where they do business. We want our customers to enjoy their experience. We want them to come here to review their materials in a safe, clean, creative environment, with salespeople who can help them design a project. Yes, some customers come in with designers, but many don’t. They walk in off the street, unsure of what they want or what goes together. So it is up to us to walk them through that process and give them a good experience
Sure, you can go somewhere, spend a lot of money, and have things, but you don’t get the experience of going to new places. Those are the things that make life memorable, and that’s what we want this to be. People are going to make these purchases, live with them, and we want them to remember this experience positively.
“Some people come in, and it’s all about the dollar. Whoever gives the lowest price gets the job, and that’s fine; we get our share of those customers. But anyone who comes here, sees our facility and how we operate, will buy here. We are an accredited company, and we produce at that extra level, which the customer sees and appreciates. One of the things I always hear from our big-box contacts is that one of the main reasons they love us is our installers. When they go out in the field, they are dressed appropriately and can communicate with customers. Many companies aren’t capable of communicating, and that is nine-tenths of the battle right there. If you’ve got installers that are able to keep a good relationship and communicate, that’s what really makes a company shine.”
Stone Interiors also offers major fixture brands, various braces and support systems, and a limited range of cabinets. Cabinetry is not something they get into much, said Duane, because many of his sales are through cabinet dealers. However, he does put customers in touch with dealers to help facilitate getting the cabinets they want. Additionally, Stone Interiors maintains contracts with local plumbers and electricians to facilitate rerouting plumbing or moving electrical outlets.
Tile work is within the company’s services, too, but once again, the company tends to focus on the higher end of that, doing backsplashes, wet areas, showers, and things like that, said Duane. “I’m not the guy you’re going to get to install 2,000 square feet of tiles throughout your house. That kind of work isn’t necessarily what I’m looking for. I’m not a $ 6-a-foot tile guy. Instead, we try to focus on the wet areas or problem areas that most people have.”
Future Plans
“Our future is a big, wild ride. We are starting to deal with a lot of these new, ultra-compact and large-format porcelain tiles. It should be interesting to see where a lot of this business develops over the next 10 or 15 years.
“Silestone just turned 25 years old, and I remember when those products first came on the market, and we thought ‘where is this going?’ So it should be interesting to see where all these new products are headed and what comes after them. We are a technology-focused company and are always looking for what is next.
“As far as the heart and soul of our company, it’s the way we pay attention to details and take care of our customers – which actually traces back to our employees, who care about our customers and make sure they have that special Stone Interiors experience. And that’s the thing! Anyone out there can go buy a piece of stone, and most can sell, fabricate, and install it, but it’s selling the “sizzle” and giving customers an outstanding experience when purchasing the countertops that really sticks with them.
“So the takeaway of our story is that it’s all about learning, looking for new things, going to the trade shows, being a member of the associations, and interacting with other companies. Don’t live in a hole. You’ve got to get out there, risk looking foolish, and realize that you don’t know everything. That’s how you learn and how you share and grow your company.”
Stone Interiors is an accredited MIA (Marble Institute of America) company. Past awards include Stone World Magazine’s Fabricator Of The Year award and the MIA Pinnacle award.
To learn more about Stone Interiors, view their website at www.stoneinteriors.com.
This content is a feature from the Slippery Rock Gazette.
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