Stone People: Expanding With Quality
She says the CNC was added mainly to produce the commercial projects the shop is involved in, along with doing inset pieces.
Click photo to enlargeThe waterjet, however, offered the big surprise. Stone Creations does a lot of inlay and mosaic work with it, as well as custom cutting for metal and glass fabricators in the area.
“It’s done quite a bit for us in efficiency and time and material savings,” she says. “It’s one of those buys where we asked ourselves why we didn’t buy this two years sooner.”
NEAT NICHES
The waterjet is also an important component for the shop as it fabricates the stone for the yacht market. Stone Creations has contracts with two yacht builders who work out of Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan “thumb,” Door County.
“When you’re providing materials for mega-yachts, people are taking penlights and looking at the kick plates under the cabinets to make sure that you’re scribed it to the floor and to the cabinet,” Kieckhafer says. “You really need the precision of a waterjet to match your templates.”
Working with yacht builders isn’t entirely different from Stone Creations’ land-based clients. However, Kieckhafer adds that, because of weight considerations, there’s some interest in using a honeycomb-back thin-stone product. Still, her preference is for a 2cm stone for most applications.
“Honeycomb panels can be fairly difficult to work with and their applications are fairly minimal, based on the fact that you can’t create the edges that a lot of clients want to see and you can’t create the sink openings a lot of people want to see,” she says. “For a lot of applications we make our own honeycomb pieces or we’ll do aluminum-backed pieces to eliminate weight. With extremely fragile pieces we’ll put a plexiglass backer on it to give more strength.”
Click photo to enlargeOther niche products the company offers are its mosaics and the faucet pods – and sometimes countertops – that the Kohler® Co. sends out to different showrooms.
“We’ve developed a niche in that industry because our packaging is so good,” says Kieckhafer. “Right now, our breakage rate is less than one-half of one percent.”
Probably Stone Creations’ greatest strength, on land or on water, is that it’s willing to act as a consultant on all types of surfaces for the architects and designers with whom it frequently works.
“If someone calls and wants to talk about LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) surfaces, we can talk about that,” Kieckhafer says. “If they want to talk about quartz surfaces, we don’t have any problem comparing them for a client so they can get the best product for the job, whether it’s quartz, natural stone or (DuPont™) Corian®.”
The company has a full solid-surface shop, along with being able to fabricate recycled-glass products, concrete and fused glass. And, that mix of products also gets Stone Creations healthy contracts with some of the country’s larger fast-food restaurant franchises.
“Probably 99 percent of the time we fabricate countertops and ship them,” says Kieckhafer of those jobs. “There are some corporate zones and corporate headquarters where there are more-specialized full-wrap tables and we’ll send out a supervisor to teach the crew – often union labor – how to do the work.”
