Valencia Firm No. 1 in ‘Cultured’ Product : Molding Home Fixtures in Image of Marble
Real marble takes arduous chiseling. But fake marble flows like oatmeal. All you’ve got to do is mold it.
And therein lies the tale of Valencia-based Gruber Systems, apparently the world’s largest producer of molds for fake, or “cultured,” marble sinks, toilets, bathtubs and the like. Gruber’s fortunes rise and fall with consumer preferences for, say, elaborately fluted sinks of hot-pink marble and matching swan-embossed shower stalls of the same material.
As Gruber executives are happy to point out, real marble costs more, can’t be molded to shape and isn’t all that durable. The virtues of fake marble, on the other hand, are manifold, they say.
And, for privately held Gruber, one virtue is that its popularity leads to profits. Gruber was founded 17 years ago by a trio of Hungarian immigrants who kicked in $5,000 each. Now, according to company president Louis Garasi, one of the original three, Gruber Systems has $8.7 million in annual sales and 120 employees working out of 100,000 square feet of office and industrial space near Magic Mountain. It also has a small plant near Orlando, Fla.
Both Gruber and its chief competitor say the Valencia company easily dominates the $20-million annual market for fake-marble molds. The total, calculated by Gruber, doesn’t include makers of bathroom fixtures, who produce their own molds.
Sells Tools, Too
About 30% of Gruber’s revenue comes from sales of other tools and components used in marble molding, Garasi said. Gruber also sells entire systems for making commercial products from fake marble. It’s in the process of supplying a system to the People’s Republic of China under a $500,000 contract, its second with that nation.
Gruber has supplied similar systems to customers in Africa, South America and the Middle East, but that business has suffered from the strong dollar, Garasi said. In any case, its main business has always been making molds.
It sells both custom-designed and off-the-shelf molds. In the former category, the strangest was for an Arab sheik, whose designer tried to have a bathtub made from a cast of the sheik’s body.
The sheik and the designer had a falling out, though, and that particular tub never got built. But Garasi says it would have been no problem.
Garasi, who changed his name from Gruber after World War II when the Russians entered Hungary and anything sounding German was suspect, is an affable 50-year-old whose knowledge of cultured marble is extensive. He now owns most of the business that he and his family started.
Cultured marble is made by mixing crushed scrap marble or limestone powder with polyester resin and a chemical catalyst. The polyester resin, a type of plastic, makes up 20% to 25% of the mixture, Garasi said. Any color--or, to increase the marble look, even veining--can be added, and the stuff can be poured just like concrete.
“We don’t like the name ‘fake’ or ‘imitation,’ ” said Roy Brewer, executive director of the Cultured Marble Institute, a trade group in Chicago. “It’s just like cultured pearls. It really is marble. We also make cultured onyx.”
Sale Increase Seen
According to Gruber, more than half of all new homes built in the United States contain cultured-marble vanities. Gruber estimates that sales of cultured marble will exceed $500 million this year, up from $350 million in 1980.
As a result, demand for cultured-marble molds has grown. Gruber has more than 1,100 styles in stock, which are made on the premises from fiberglass. They are typically sold for about $300 a mold to fixture manufacturers, mostly for bathrooms. Each is good for about 1,000 castings, marketing vice president John Hoskinson said.
And Gruber has prospered. The company now has assets of $3.5 million to $4 million, Garasi said, with little debt and a net worth of $2.5 million. Sales last year were $8.7 million, he said, and should reach $10 million this year.
Cultured marble is particularly good for the kind of elaborate tubs that have become increasingly popular in recent years, Hoskinson said.
‘Romantic Products’
“People are starting to look at the privacy of the bathroom as a place to relax,” he said, pointing to a two-person mold under construction. “In a lot of ways, these are romantic products.”
Such a tub, which has two facing slopes, would sell for $1,500 to $3,000, he said.
The same products in real marble would be too expensive for most customers, Garasi said. A simple sink and vanity combination of marble would cost 50 times the cultured marble version, mostly because of the labor involved, but even a plain wall panel made from the cheapest genuine marble costs a third more, he said.
Gruber is also hoping to exploit the popularity of whirlpool baths by selling everything from whirlpool-bath molds to whirlpool pipes and fittings. Gruber even sells systems for making whirlpools from Gruber molds. The company doesn’t make or sell the actual tubs.
‘A Good Year’
Gruber doesn’t disclose profits, but industry observers say that the fortunes of cultured marble--and cultured-marble molds--depend heavily on the health of the construction industry. For example, during the severe construction slump of 1982-83, the company reduced the working hours of some employees.
Lately, though, things are better. Garasi said 1985 has been “Not a fantastic year, but a good year.”
He said that, nationwide, home remodeling jobs generate about half the sales of cultured marble, and new homes account for about half. But, in the fast-growing Southwest, new homes account for about 75% of cultured-marble sales.
