Arch City Granite & Marble
St. Louis, Missouri Company is a Model for Method & Success
by Peter J. Marcucci
Photos Courtesy Arch City Granite & Marble (Hover over photos for captions)
After leaping into the fabrication market place in 2006, the then fledgling Arch City Granite & Marble Inc. has since grown by leaps and bounds to become one of St. Louis, Missouri’s highest quality, environmentally sustainable stone fabricators of the decade.
Originally conceived as a stone distributor, the company, after just eight years, is by all standards a shining example of success.
While having the good fortune to emigrate from India to the U.S. in 1999, Govi Reddy, Owner of Arch City Granite & Marble began sowing the seeds of change, and with a past deeply rooted in stone, including friends with quarries, continued nurturing those seeds into the prolific, blossoming company that today stands tall in the pristine Arch City. Moreover, while again having good fortune, Govi Reddy was able to receive first-hand stone fabrication training in 2003 by Venu Reddy, owner of Deco Granite in Albany, New York and quickly learned CNC programming and installation as well as the ins and outs of the stone business.
“Venu is my nephew, and I was able to stay and work with him and learn every aspect of his fabrication shop and even went on installations with his crew,” explained Govi.
“I also kept one of my main production guys there for three months to allow him every opportunity to learn every stage of fabrication, including CNC programming and how to measure digitally.
My nephew was a big help to me, and I was very fortunate to have had someone’s shoulder to look over during this learning stage. Venu even came to St. Louis during the embryonic stage of the company in 2005.”
Arch City Granite & Marble’s main focus is residential work with 90 percent being kitchens, producing an average of 30 per month, while also providing vanity tops and tub decks to the company’s growing customer base.
Additionally, many of the company’s larger scale projects also include fireplace surrounds.
Sales, according to Govi, are about 75 percent granite and 15 percent marble with the majority of slab work being 3-cm thick.
Embracing materials such as Caesarstone, Zodiac and Silestone has also helped solidify the company’s market position, but it is the premium and exotic materials and custom edges the company offers that garner much of the local as well as distant sales.
“In our original St. Louis location, we service a 60 mile radius and cater to the surrounding suburbs while also maintaining a strong presence in Southern Illinois, but we have, in the past, taken on custom, large-scale projects much farther away.
Our new and second showroom, built last year, was created to service a much broader market outside of St. Louis. This showroom is conveniently located in O’Fallon, Missouri to service the fast growing area of St. Charles County. Both facilities combined encompass 20,000 square feet of property. I’m very happy to say that very soon we will be completely redoing our original showroom in St. Louis, because it does not reflect the higher quality of work that we now perform. We are now able to do very intricate edge detailing.”
According to Govi he seldom visits other countries or buys direct, and the majority of the time buys from MS International because their operation is so big. “Even if I directly import, I really don’t save much because MS International in Chicago has very competitive prices and a huge selection under one roof. Do I plan to import—I don’t think so, except maybe a few containers of stone per year of staple colors. We keep over 70 different premium and exotic colors in stock, and I constantly strive to make hi-grade stone more affordable by personally buying select materials in larger quantities.”
Clearly Govi and company not only have great respect for their clients, but also have great respect for the stone that took millions of years to create – and a comparatively shorter amount of time to fabricate, adding that the majority of his sales are from past clients’ references and are his best advertisement.
“We are a textbook example of a fabrication shop and we are very focused on customer satisfaction, and while a small portion of our work is in the commercial sector, most of our work is in the residential market. After each job we ask our clients to complete two surveys. The first is a detailed checklist presented to them showing what we’ve performed at their residence including sink and dishwasher anchors, seam treatment, cooktop and faucet holes; while the second is a final survey sent to each and every client asking them to rate us in satisfaction from a performance, product and sales point of view, while additionally asking if they would be willing to recommend us to other people. Fortunately ninety-eight percent of those clients gave us high marks. This survey directly influences our A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau as well as reflects the high ratings we’ve received in our area from Google. I’m not saying that we never have an issue, but it is my personal job to look at any problem and do my best to resolve it to the full satisfaction of our clients. That is my number one job as owner of the company and is very important to me.”
Arch City Granite and Marble currently employs three people for marketing and sales and four shop craftsmen with most being cross-trained and able to work any machine. Those machines include a Sasso Meccanica linear edge polisher, 2-Brembana CNC machines and a Brembana bridge saw.
“I am very happy with Brembana. They are great machines, and having two of their CNC machines gives us the ability to create a high quality product with very fast turnaround. As far as templating, one big thing that makes Arch City Granite & Marble different from a quality aspect is that we do the very best digital templating. We can enter our clients’ homes and make our templates effectively and quickly, and that creates confidence in our ability to perform and raises our client satisfaction rate, and thanks to the high skill set of our field man and our digital templating machine, we have an almost perfect record of accuracy in countertop installations. Surprisingly enough, our very first kitchen was electronically templated, and we are currently using a Prodim Proliner digital templater.”
Govi continued, “It is very user-friendly, fast, and it is easy to train someone, even someone who has minimal computer skills.”
When asked about safety and environmentally sustainable production methods, Govi said: “From the very first day we began production, we did so using a large water recycling system made by Beckart Environmental Systems. It is very efficient and yields 80 gallons per minute of water flow which is what’s needed for our machines. It doesn’t impact the environment and saves money. In fact, my water bill is equal to that of an average family running their sprinklers during the summer. It is a closed-loop system and doesn’t discharge anything into the environment. The second thing would be the problem of discarding of our smaller leftover remnants. To solve that, we’ve recently partnered with the local waste disposal company in St. Louis that takes them to a recycling facility where reusable products are produced. We have been doing this for five months now.”
A dust collection system is also used throughout the shop. Safety, according to Govi, is a paramount concern of his for his working group. “All of our people are valuable. We have an excellent hands-on fabricator who does any hand work needed, but most of our cutting, shaping and polishing is done by our CNC machines. In spite of that, obviously our hand fabricator has to do touch up, hand fitting, and work on small things that cannot be done on our machines. I am proud to have such good people here. They are all very experienced, loyal, and create a great product. They like our shop and do a great job so we don’t have problems.”
With Savvy Stone Craftsmanship, Govi and Company Continue to Rock and Roll Into The Future
“The last five years we have overcome many challenges with a lot of hard work and long hours. I would say that things now are okay, and we are in a safe zone, but it was a big struggle. Being in the stone industry, we were directly affected by the housing market, and at the time didn’t have many major accounts. That actually became a blessing when the economy went down because my share of the builder’s market was small. Our sales only dropped by 20 percent during those years. Now, I want to focus on sales to the builders. Encapsulating this market is a big part of my future goals, as is servicing the many designers in the area because they want the higher quality work, and they are the ones that want the exotic stones. We have been fortunate in the past to have done many elaborate and notable custom residential homes using up to 10-12 slabs, with some jobs being quite distant from our shop. We are currently bidding on more large-scale work, and I am hopeful.”
“So our main focus is not only being a high quality fabricator by virtue of using quality machinery, we are also able to provide higher quality stones at a reasonable price to our clients, due to the way we buy them. I also think that educating people about pricing and quality standards is the best thing fabricators can do. Honestly, some people don’t come here because I don’t advertise low ball prices like $29.99 a square foot, but that is just sound business practice. It’s important to hold your prices, keep your margin and just focus on quality at a fair price.
“I’m also a bit of a technology fan, so in the future, maybe next year, I’ll be adding a saw-jet. That way we’ll become even more efficient in production and bring in more work. We’ve made great strides over the years, and we have all the necessary knowledge, experience and machines to produce a quality product expeditiously, and I’m very optimistic that we will be growing even faster now.”
Upon concluding our conversation, I asked Govi one more question: Are you a Braxton-Bragg customer? He quickly responded, “Big Time! I became a customer of Braxton-Bragg a few years ago and since then it has been so easy for me to just call and order, and what I’ve ordered comes promptly. With the exception of a few pieces of tooling, my entire source of supplies is from Braxton-Bragg.
Visit Arch City Granite & Marble’s excellent website at www.archcitygranite.com or call 314-426-3100.