Innovation Takes Company to New Heights

When you make specialty ceilings for a living, every project is over your head. But when Nancy Mercolino won a contract to build a blue moon, she knew the skills of her Commerce-based Ceilings Plus would be pushed to the outer limits.

The job was to create the metallic skin for a giant, shimmering orb. It was to be the centerpiece of Manhattan’s hottest architectural project, the new planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. It would require Mercolino’s staff to fabricate 2,386 precision-curved aluminum panels punched with 5,599,663 perfectly aligned, sound-absorbing perforations. These oversized jigsaw pieces would then have to fit seamlessly over an 87-foot diameter steel sphere designed to hold nearly 600 people.

“Every architect in the country would be watching,” said Mercolino, president and majority owner of Ceilings Plus. “If we screwed up, they’d know about it.”

They didn’t screw up. The planetarium with its dazzling blue-lit sphere opened in February to rave reviews. Ceilings Plus posted its best year ever in 1999 with $10 million in sales. Now the company’s specialty ceilings and interior wood and metal work are popping up all over the place.

Look up the next time you’re walking through Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, Bally’s Casino in Atlantic City, or Staples Center, Central Library, the Ahmanson Theatre or some of the subway stations in Los Angeles. If you don’t trip over your own feet, you’ll glimpse how a small local outfit found a profitable niche in an industry that hasn’t seen so much innovation since Michelangelo spruced up the lid on the Sistine Chapel.

“Ceilings aren’t just flat white things anymore,” said William Shannon, a board member with the industry’s major trade group, the Ceilings and Interior Systems Construction Assn. “Curved metal is particularly hot . . . and Ceilings Plus has been one of the innovators.”

Inspired by cutting-edge architects such as Los Angeles’ Frank Gehry, modern ceilings have shed their two-dimensional boundaries for free-flowing bends and arcs. Curved panels are suspended overhead and aligned to form connecting hills and valleys in a landscape turned upside down. Lightweight metal has replaced that cottage cheese-looking stuff for style points in interior design. But these aren’t the tin ceilings of yesteryear.

Thanks to computer-aided design and more sophisticated manufacturing techniques, specialty fabricators such as Ceilings Plus are making metal panels bigger, stronger, lighter and curvier than was possible just a few years ago. Even commodity manufacturers are getting into the act. Giant Armstrong World Industries recently unveiled a three-dimensional metal ceiling product called Serpentina, named for its undulating design.

So how do you compete with a leviathan with more than $3.4 billion in annual sales?

By doing custom work that the big guys can’t and by developing proprietary technology to stay ahead of the pack.

Frustrated by conventional metal-bending methods that could take an operator an hour to complete a typical 2 1/2-by-8-foot aluminum panel, Mercolino’s team set out to build a machine that would do it faster and with more precision. It took years to develop, but that mechanism now allows Ceilings Plus to crank out curved metal panels as much as six times faster than they could the traditional way. The sensitive mechanism also puts less stress on the metal, allowing the company to bend panels as thin as one millimeter without marring the surface.

That translates into huge savings in material and labor. Thus the machine has become a closely guarded secret at Ceilings Plus headquarters, situated in a squat industrial building across from a mattress outlet and a tire warehouse.

This gritty stretch of Commerce would appear an unlikely hotbed of corporate espionage. But don’t tell that to the wary Mercolino, a slight, energetic woman who looks younger than her 40 years. With great reluctance she allowed a reporter to watch as a worker fed a flat, wobbly aluminum sheet into the grand-piano-sized contraption. It spit out a sturdy, artfully curved ceiling panel in a matter of minutes. However, she refused to divulge how it worked and why.

“Our competitors would love to know, too,” Mercolino said. “That’s our secret weapon.”

Ceilings Plus first used the machine to create the ceiling for the Guam International Airport in 1995. It was a breakthrough project that paved the way for a slew of additional aviation contracts, such as American Airlines’ new G Concourse in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The concourse is a sleek, high-tech affair designed by Chicago-based architect Teng & Associates Inc., which chose Ceilings Plus to do the ceilings, columns and other interior trim after interviewing a half-dozen competitors and visiting the Commerce factory.

“We liked their technical capabilities,” said Anthony Saifuku, senior project manager with Teng & Associates. “They’ve got a great product, good quality control . . . and they can do things in-house that other vendors couldn’t.”

Fueled by its growing national reputation and a robust economy, Ceilings Plus has watched sales double every year for the last four years. Profit has soared 260% annually over the same time period and the work force has grown steadily to 60 employees.

It’s a far cry from the early ‘90s recession, when the roof caved in on the construction industry and nearly flattened Ceilings Plus along with it.

Mercolino and her business partner and husband, Joe, recall how the red ink flowed when the jobs dried up. Still they refused to lay off their most valued employees, folks they knew they’d need when the good times came back.

That loyalty paid off in the form of a skilled and seasoned work force. So did the decision to invest heavily in cutting-edge design and manufacturing equipment. It’s a lesson Mercolino learned as a young entrepreneur in the 1980s when she owned a tiny circuit board design firm that was outpaced by automation. She got into the ceiling business by purchasing a small lighting design firm that eventually merged with another company to become Ceilings Plus.

“We had to grow this business or pull the plug,” she said. “We weren’t going to make it using antiquated equipment.”

The company’s technological prowess has been a factor in landing jobs such as the New York planetarium project. Known as the Rose Center for Earth and Space, it was designed by New York architects at Polshek Partnership, who used computer-aided design software to plot the giant sphere that would house two space-themed theaters.

Those electronic drawings were shipped to Ceilings Plus via e-mail. Back in Commerce, skilled workers such as senior designer Gary Kawamura digitally deciphered one of the trickier aspects of design. In addition to being precisely curved, the thousands of aluminum panels covering the sphere needed to be pierced with millions of tiny sound-absorbing holes. But these perforations had to be arranged in a uniform filigree, lest the sphere come out looking like some oversized Impressionist pincushion.

“There are very few [fabricators] in the world capable of producing something that complicated,” said Richard Wolkowitz, senior project manager with Morse Diesel Intl., the New York-based construction management firm that oversaw the project. “I’m not aware of any other U.S. company that could have done it.”

With the construction industry booming nationwide, Mercolino is predicting another record year for sales. The company just installed another proprietary panel-bending machine, a fully automated behemoth, four times larger than the original, that Mercolino has dubbed the “stealth bomber.” Now Ceilings Plus is eyeing foreign markets, having just licensed its technology to a South Korean firm.

But there is one critical ceiling project the company continues to ignore--its own. Asked to explain the water-stained checkerboard mess sagging over the heads of some of the office personnel, Mercolino just shrugged.

“You know what they say about the shoemaker’s shoes,” she said with a laugh. “We’ve been too busy to mess with it.”