Aaron J. Crowley

Stone Industry Consultant

IF you’re a fabricator, you know the frustration of being short one piece of back splash for a job and the panic of trying to find another fabricator with a matching remnant so you can avoid buying an additional full slab.

If you’re a slab supplier, you’re familiar with the time-consuming calls from homeowners and designers who want you to track down the last five fabricators who have bought slabs in the color they want so they can find a cheap remnant to finish their little projects.

Remnants! Definitely a four-letter word for stone professionals!

The remnant reality is this: a lot of fabricators have a lot of them and a lot of other fabricators, homeowners, and designers want them.  The problem has always been the universal difficulty of efficiently connecting the “haves” with “have nots.”

It has always been the old needle in a haystack problem.

Enter RemnantLocator.com

A few years ago on a whim (and back when fabricating was profitable), I hired a software engineer to write a web-based program in an attempt to solve this nagging problem. The concept was so simple and easy to use, I was unprepared for how well it worked in the Portland Metro area once it caught on and the user base reached critical mass!  

My original vision was to make it available in every major city in America once we worked the bugs out here in Portland, Oregon.  But then the Great Recession hit… and building a free remnant locating service took a back seat to survival. 

But that all changes today as Braxton-Bragg and the Slippery Rock Gazette graciously allow me to announce the nationwide roll-out of www.RemnantLocator.com in the 100 largest metro areas and cities across the USA!

Here is how and why it works:

Fabricators simply visit RemnantLocator.com and register based on the city or metro area they are closest to.  

As a Registered Fabricator, your “Remnant Request” is then automatically emailed to all of the other Registered Fabricators in your area.  You will also receive “Remnant Requests” via email whenever another user submits a request.

To make a “Remnant Request” as a registered fabricator, you only have to log on to RemnantLocator.com and enter the basic information of the remnant you need – material name, slab supplier, thickness, size, etc. – then hit “Submit.”  The program automatically creates an emailed “Remnant Request” that is sent to every other fabricator registered in your city or metro area.

If a fabricator has a requested remnant, they contact the person making the request and make arrangements for the transfer.  Fabricators who don’t have the remnant, simply delete the email! 

Remnant Locator is not a searchable data-base or list of available remnants that fabricators have posted to a web site and must maintain. It is a Localized Request broadcasted to all of the other Registered Fabricators in your area.

It’s Easy, it Works, and it’s FREE!

How you can help make it better:

RemnantLocator.com only works when there are enough fabricators registered in a metro area to create a pool of potential remnants large enough to make it likely that users can quickly find what they need when they desperately need it.

That makes you a very influential person on this mission to turn remnants into dollars made and tears saved for American fabricators. Will you consider telling everyone you know in the stone business about this new service? It will be a huge help!

The Future:

In closing, building the fabricator networks in every city in America is only the beginning!

Once that is achieved, we will make it available to homeowners and designers so they too can submit remnant requests to the fabricators who choose to receive them. 

Then instead of interruptions on the phone and a disruptive walk in traffic, slab suppliers and fabricators alike will be able to manage those remnant-requesting consumers by sending them to RemnantLocator.com first, and then screening them through email in-boxes!

So visit www.RemnantLocator.com today to begin America’s Remnant Revolution!

Aaron Crowley is a stone shop owner, author, speaker, and consultant to mid size stone companies. Contact him at aaron@fabricatorsfriend.com