Since opening its doors in a 10,000-square-foot North Kingstown warehouse in 2005, Saint John Stone has pursued a national clientele of architects and designers that until this year’s economic slowdown had grown its annual revenue by 760 percent.
In the company’s first year in business, revenue hit about $500,000. The next year, that jumped to about $2.3 million. Last year, when the company moved into a 40,000-square-foot warehouse, revenue hit $4.3 million.
The growth, said founder and President Barry Eyre, has been from pitching their product – mostly slabs of granite, onyx and marble – directly to architects around the world. “About two years ago, I really started a heavy focus on going after architects and interior designers working in hospitality and gaming,” Eyre said. “And we’ve just had an incredible response rate with that group.”
One of Saint John’s biggest clients is the Rockwell Group, the New York-based design and architecture firm that has designed much of Mohegan Sun Casino.
Saint John’s stone was used extensively in the new Casino of the Wind, including as the top of the central circular bar.
But a few weeks ago, the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority, citing the national economic downturn, announced that it will suspend work on its Earth Expansion and re-evaluate the project in about a year. The overall development, dubbed Project Horizon, had a proposed cost of about $740 million, but has been scaled back to $271 million, the authority said.
For Saint John Stone, the impact of that might lead to a smaller margin of growth in this year’s revenue, Eyre said. He’s targeting about $5 million in revenue this year. That $700,000 in growth would be only about a 16-percent gain – last year’s growth was about 87 percent over the previous year.
“The market is slowing down for lots of things,” he said.
But Saint John is still working directly with hotels and designers in New York, Las Vegas, Dallas and Los Angeles. They are it’s biggest markets, but Boston also accounts for some of the company’s demand.
Eyre said his company is holding onto many of those contracts by cutting the shipping costs – because he’s able to ship directly from Asia to a job site. And Saint John’s international presence has allowed the company to seek out unique stones that other companies don’t offer, Eyre said.
The company has 15 Rhode Island employees and four employees working in its showroom in China. Erich Hielmann, a partner, has been in Asia for four years. Eyre recently took on another partner, Lucy Minturn.
In its Rhode Island warehouse, the company doesn’t usually offer slabs for retail, but does do some direct business with installers. Saint John also has created a line of floor and wall tiles that it retails in about 70 stores around the country, Eyre said.
With an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Eyre worked as a derivatives trader in London before returning with his family, which owned a home in Narragansett, to the United States after the Sept. 2001 terrorist attacks. Eyre went to work turning multi-family homes in Providence into condominiums.
“And that’s when I started learning about the granite and marble business,” he said recently. “I realized there was not a distributor in Rhode Island, so I saw an opportunity in the marketplace.”
Saint John Stone opened its doors in North Kingstown in January 2005. Before opening the store, Eyre made a trip to China and started buying stone.
“I actually ordered a whole group of materials before I even had a warehouse back here in Rhode Island,” he said.
Eyre is preparing to open another office in Las Vegas. The stone slabs the company sells run from about $1,500 to about $4,000.
“What we bring to clients is an aesthetic and the way we look at things, which matches the way they look at things,” Eyre said. •
