SFA Mega Workshop: Why It’s Important

(From “This mega workshop is a really big deal,” by Mark Lauzon, posted on Sept. 8 at the Stone Fabricators Alliance website)

Understanding why this workshop is a really big big deal!

I’ll tell you a short story.

Click photo to enlargeA week or so after Sept. 11, 2001, I boarded a mostly empty Airbus and flew to Milan, Italy, to attend the Verona Fair Stone show (Marmomacc). I was one of a small handful of Americans at the show that year. It was weird…nobody was flying out of the states … a lot of Americans canceled their travel plans after the World Trade Center towers were attacked.

I landed in Milan and took a train to Verona, checked into my hotel, and got ready to go to the show. I cannot describe how nice people were to me; people thanked me for coming and got tears in their eyes as they mentioned the tragedy that had terrorized our nation a week earlier.

This was very early in my fabrication career. My shop was a metal shed attached to a pig barn in rural Oregon. We had 2 or 3 workers and fabricated one or two kitchens per week. We were cutting slabs with an Imer combi 3000. I had been making kitchens for a year or two at this point.

I went to the stone show in Verona and was floored. So much to see! At some point on that first day, I wandered into the most incredible booth I had ever seen. There were supermodels, amazing displays, slabs with colors I had never seen, incredible finishes (this was around the time when resined slabs were starting to appear). The booth sign said: Antolini ….

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