Stone People: Expanding With Quality

By K. Schipper

SHAWANO, Wis. – Stone Creations of Wisconsin typically serves the higher end of the natural-stone market … like, for example, yachts.

Primarily a wholesale fabricator since it opened for business in 1999, the company – perhaps not surprisingly – was hit hard by the recent economic downturn. For the first time in a decade, Stone Creations began selling to the retail market.

Click photo to enlargePresident Trish Kieckhafer believes only a strong company could have made it through the past three or four years; and, while it was a tough haul, Stone Creations is close to moving ahead full speed again.

Next up for the company: a new 20,000 ft² building to house the showroom space and offices the business needs.

MAKING A CAREER

Like the company itself, Kieckhafer has come a long way since she opened the business with a few pieces of equipment and a crew of six.

The idea for Stone Creations came from her husband, Tom. At the time, the couple owned four monument companies – although Trish Kieckhafer was working for Krueger International (KI), a manufacturer of furniture for the education, business, medical and government markets.

“I had an awesome job; I really loved what I did,” she says.

Still, with numerous requests from their monument clients and others for countertops, it made sense to form a separate entity within their corporation. And, Kieckhafer says she had a secret reason for making the shift to stone.

“I actually have a college minor in geology,” she says. “I was always interested in geology and natural stone, but it just wasn’t something – when I went to school – I could figure out how to make into a career.”

Click photo to enlargeKieckhafer says she began by learning all she could about the countertop business, from templating and fabricating to tooling and the purchasing of slabs, as well as the geology behind them.

When the company opened for business, it featured several pieces of Park Industries equipment including a Cougar® bridge saw, a Pro-Edge® shaper/polisher and a Wizard radial arm workstation.

“It was pretty crazy when it started,” Kieckhafer says. “I walked into a group of six men who were all about 20 years older than I was, and I said, ‘We need to make this work. You need to teach me about stone. I know a lot about production processes and sales and I think we can make a good team.’”

Her assessment was correct. Today, the company employs 27 (“We’re in a mode of interviewing right now to add staff, and we’re probably four positions light”), including Tom Kieckhafer, who left the monument business to take over as production manager for Stone Creations.

Over the same amount of time, the shop-equipment inventory grew to encompass a second Cougar and a second Pro-Edge, as well as a Flow International waterjet, a CMS/Brembana CNC machine, and a Marmo Mecchanica flat polishing machine.

The shop also has a dust booth.

“We added the dust booth in 2003 or 2004, simply because we wanted to increase the safety factor of our facility,” Trish Kieckhafer explains. “We also wanted to protect our equipment and slabs from an onslaught of dust.

“We store all our materials inside and that’s part of our showroom, so when people go to hand-select their slabs we want our environment to be very, very clean.”