In recent months, I made "repeat visits" to two different fabrication shops that I had first covered before the recession turned our industry upside down, and both shops are profiled in this ENewsletter.One was a very effective shop in Maryland that focused on highend residential fabrication and the other was a "Mega-Shop" in Nevada that processed jobs that featured as much as 300,000 square feet of stone for the resort and casino trade in Las Vegas.
In both cases, the shop's business philosophy and client base had changed quite a bit since the mid-2000s. In the case of the first shop, Artelye Marble & Granite of Beltsville, MD, the company has broadened its focus, and it now relies on commercial fabrication for a significant portion of its business. The shop itself actually doesn't look much different than when I was there in 2006, other than the fact that they added a SawJet. But they also changed their approach to sales, and they added digital templating and programming technology that helps them process architectural stonework.