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Interview with James Sheppard, President of Vetrazzo
Here’s a company that can provide you even more motivation to recycle - the bottles you toss into your recycling bins may end up as the centerpiece of your kitchen! Vetrazzo collects discarded glass from recycled bottles and decommissioned traffic lights and and transforms it into beautiful, eco-friendly surfaces such as countertops and tabletops.
James Sheppard, President of Vetrazzo, reveals the details of their products’ sustainable design (85% of the product is from recycled glass) - and how their unique combination of sustainable design and aesthetic design is giving their products an edge in the marketplace.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Drive your marketing efforts by featuring unique sustainable design to stand out from the crowd of look-alike products
- The flip side - the challenges of being amongst the first companies with a unique product feature
- Vetrazzo’s strategies for growing the company’s sales and reach
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
JANIS MARA, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello. This is Janis Mara from Green Business Innovators. I’m speaking with James Sheppard, Chief Executive of Vetrazzo, a 3 year-old business that makes countertops with glass, salvaged from sources including traffic lights, curbside recycling containers and the manufacturing plant of Sky Vodka. The 35-employee company is part of a cluster of green businesses in a former Ford assembly plant located just off the freeway in Richmond, California.
Tell me James, how did you get the idea to recycle glass and into countertops?
JAMES SHEPPARD: Well Janis, I’d like to take credit for thinking of the idea, but Vetrazzo has actually been on the market since 1996, as the original recycled glass surface. I got the idea to purchase the business and relaunch it on a national level a few years ago, when my business partner showed me her gorgeous Vetrazzo countertops that she’d had since 1999, and I knew the time was right to take this product to the national stage.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: How about that. Are these countertops as tough as granite?
JAMES SHEPPARD: Vetrazzo is very comparable to granite on all fronts, in terms of heat resistance, scratch resistance, hardness, stain resistance, etc. It really performed very comparably with granite.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Oh, okay. How much do they cost?
JAMES SHEPPARD: They’re priced like premium granite. Granite runs a range from Home Depot granite that’s in every tract home on the outside of every city in America, to the kind of granite that makes you go, “Wow! That’s gorgeous!” And we are in the latter category.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So obviously these countertops are environmentally-friendly because they’re made of recycled materials. Can you tell me specifically, what kind of savings, in terms of carbon emissions, a person will make by buying your countertops?
JAMES SHEPPARD: Sure. It’s difficult to calculate exactly, and we’re actually involved in a very leading edge carbon-footprinting project, where we’re looking at our materials carbon footprint compared with the other materials on the market. So we’ll have more detailed information later next year, when the project is complete. That said, certainly the biggest carbon savings is in offsetting the products that would otherwise be purchased. People don’t think of that fact, that most granite is quarried in the third world. In many cases, it’s quarried in Brazil, transported to China, processed in China, and then transported back to America at a major, major carbon footprint. So purchasing a domestically made American product certainly cuts down on that dramatically.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That’s very interesting. I hadn’t known that. So tell me, what kind of marketing are you doing to get the word out and attract clients?
JAMES SHEPPARD: Well, we do some of the usual exercises, like trade shows. We’re at four major building trade shows a year, but I would say our biggest mechanism is publicity, because the market is really tired of the existing options. Granite really isn’t very exciting to the design community anymore. The home and garden television shows, the design publications, they’re always looking for what’s the exciting stuff on the market. So we get a lot of traction that way. In fact, actor and environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr. was on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno back in April showing off his Vetrazzo countertop and bragging to Jay that there are a thousand coke bottles in his countertop. It’s great to get that recycling message out to the whole Tonight Show audience.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Yeah, and I believe one of the ways that you’ve managed to get so much traction is that you have a marketing director and publicist. Is that correct?
JAMES SHEPPARD: We do have a director of marketing. We actually, we had a PR firm, but we don’t use them anymore because we found that we’ve been able to get very good access to the media with our own resources.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And has being green helped you attract customers?
JAMES SHEPPARD: Well, it certainly has. And first and foremost people buy our product because it’s visually distinctive and gorgeous, but they brag about it because it’s green. So there’s no doubt that the fact that we’re really a visual testament to their environmental values has helped consumers select our product.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: How many countertops have you sold, since your former launch?
JAMES SHEPPARD: Since we re-launched the business at the end of 2006, we’ve sold about 3,500 slabs. We’ve recycled, this year alone, about 1,500 tons of waste glass, much of it otherwise destined for the landfill.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Congratulations. So do you have plans to expand?
JAMES SHEPPARD: Yes. This plant-we’re on phase 3 of a 5-phased expansion plan. We’ll be doubling our plant capacity by this time next year. And we’re actually in the early stages of scouting a location for a plant on the east coast as well.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Tell me, amid all this success that you’re obviously having, what is your greatest challenge?
JAMES SHEPPARD: I would say the greatest challenge is starting to be green washing from the 900-pound gorillas in the industry. There are a lot of big companies that are now sprinkling a little recycled glass into their otherwise petroleum-based products that are imported from China and calling them green. And they have very, very large marketing budgets. So we need to be very, very diligent in getting our marketing message across and helping people understand that this is waste glass from America, kept in America.
I’d say the second challenge is certainly the cost of Chinese production. People wonder why can’t your product be cheap. It’s made with recycled glass, cut, the matter is we’re committed to manufacturing in America, and we’re a certified green business. We pay our employees a living wage. Everyone has health care, and we follow some very rigorous social guidelines. That’s hard to compete with the cost structure of Chinese products that flood the market everyday.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And so tell me then, what is your greatest opportunity?
JAMES SHEPPARD: Well, I think there is a major shift in people’s perception of building products out there, and people are demanding sustainable materials. And so we certainly meet that requirement. And I think from a design perspective, people are tired of granite. They’re tired of the existing options out there. So we’ve got this fantastic alignment of people being motivated to do the right thing for the planet, but also wanting something gorgeous and visually distinctive. So our exercise is to execute on our expansion plan and have the Vetrazzo available in every state in the country by the end of key one next year.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Well great. More power to you. James, thanks so much for sharing your insights with us.
JAMES SHEPPARD: Thank you for having me, Janis.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: You bet.
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