When I joined Braxton-Bragg six years ago I asked our management team about the published standards for tools in the stone industry. It took me quite a while to really understand that there aren’t any.     

The MIA developed standards for application, but we could find no standards for tools.  Without standards how do customers evaluate products? How do distributors decide what to sell? How do you evaluate value? How can you measure quality?

As we prepare our 2015 catalog we have the opportunity to review existing product performance and learn about new products. For the last few months we have all been hip-deep in learning and evaluating the “stuff” we offer.

You see, I love learning about how stuff works – and why. The first 25 years of my career were spent in manufacturing jobs, making stuff.  The last 15 have been devoted to selling stuff. I simply love the stuff of stuff.

For instance, when I made telephone equipment, there were published standards because products had to work within the existing phone system. When I was with P&G, we tested Charmin for softness with special test equipment. At Fellowes, I made paper shredders that complied with US Government standards for security. And when I sold stuff, I had to commit to certain levels of sell-through and to make sure the stuff I sold wasn’t returned because we either over-sold or under-delivered.

All these experiences with different kinds of stuff keep bringing me back to the questions I asked above. And as I continued my quest to answer these questions I learned that most customers develop their own standards through trial and error.  

In other words, the customers are the Guinea Pigs. Distributors are, for the most part, dependent on claims made by middlemen and manufacturers for information. I found it very difficult to believe that this was the way things were, so I hired a consulting engineer to walk the floor of Coverings 2008 and evaluate all the tools on display and to talk to as many fabricators as possible to learn how things really worked. His report simply confirmed what our management team had told me.

So the big questions remain: How can a customer afford to test everything, and to keep testing so they don’t miss out on industry advances? Why should distributors rely simply on words from middlemen and manufacturers? Where were/are the guarantees?

It seemed to me that the core question that we really needed to understand was how can we make the best decisions without agreed standards, physical tests, and unbiased evaluations?

Next month I will explain the process we began six years ago to answer these nagging questions. Then in October I will write about the results of that process. Stay tuned.

Have a good read.

Rich Hassert

Email responses to: publisher@slipperyrockgazette.net