Solid With Soapstone

More recently, the company has continued to expand because of the marketing skills she honed at DuPont Canada. Early on, Noreen Frank says she began advertising the business using photos of the product. She soon found it wasn’t enough.

“Being Canada, a lot of people think soapstone is soft, like the carving stones that come from the Inuit Indians,” she says. “And, I’d go to the kitchen shops, and they’d say, ‘No, we only offer granite.’ I realized this wasn’t going down the right track.”

Click photo to enlargeFrank decided she would have to educate her customers about soapstone, and she began writing longer ads – paid articles, really – all about soapstone.

“I needed to get people to see what soapstone is all about,” she says. “I want them to love it like I love it. Once people started reading about it, they’d go to our Web page and check it out and that’s where all the growth came from.”

Business reached the point that in May of last year the couple began looking for a new location for the operation, which had been located near their home in Whitby, Ont. The main need, Noreen Frank says, was for more fabrication space, which would also allow the company to add employees.

In late December 2006, the couple moved N & G to a 10,000 ft² facility 45 minutes away, and considerably closer to downtown Toronto.

“We’ve got about 1,800² in the showroom, and the balance of that is the shop,” she says. “It’s a beautiful move, and even though it’s a smaller community, we’re in the greater Toronto area and much closer to the high-end-building clientele.”

The fact that the landlords – who happen to be custom-home builders – have their own 20,000 ft² home décor center in the same building doesn’t hurt, either.

While she started her marketing focused primarily on the Toronto area, the couple’s horizons expanded along with the business. Ads seen Canada-wide have allowed N & G to sell jobs to clients as far away as the Cayman Islands and Vancouver, and these days she believes the company is one of the largest fabricators of soapstone in Canada.

Although Noreen Frank says it’s not unusual for the shop’s crew to travel four hours for some jobs, more commonly cabinet makers send templates to the shop, which then cuts each job to spec and ships it back out.

“We will then walk them through the installation,” Noreen Frank says. “We get with them on the phone and tell them if they have a problem to give us a call. We’re available by phone so they’re not getting stuck with a question at an awkward moment.”

Sales have been brisk enough in eastern Canada that N & G has recently added a two-man templating and installation crew, and the Franks plan to eventually offer the same convenience to their west coast customers.

FOCUS ON CUSTOM

About the only group the Franks aren’t very interested in serving is homebuilders where the numbers are large and the look is cookie-cutter.

“Usually we work with homeowners or their designers or architects,” says Noreen Frank. “For instance, we seem to do a lot of high-end condos. We’re also developing our commercial business.Click photo to enlarge

“ Soapstone is very attractive for bars, and right now we’re specing a job for a bed-and-breakfast in Newfoundland. It’s very popular for floors in public places, such as bathrooms, because it doesn’t harbor bacteria.”

One of its other advantages, she adds, is that it fits in kitchens with a variety of looks, from very-old-fashioned to modern.

“We do a lot of modern-looking kitchens because people want something they don’t have to worry about when they’re entertaining,” she says. “You don’t have to worry about it staining, or about etching from acidic foods.”

That may be a subtle dig at some of the other stones on the market, but products such as granite and marble are also-rans at N & G. In fact, the shop’s showroom shows only samples of those products, and there aren’t slabs of them waiting for customers, either.

“Marble and granite have been around a long time, and people see if wherever they go,” she says. “If we have a customer who wants that, we have our suppliers. Obviously, if someone comes in and tells me what colors they’re looking for and what they want, I’ll try to steer them in the proper direction.”