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New North B2B
December 2011
Working Against the Grain
Woodworker shifts entrepreneurial gears between custom cabinetry and kitchenware
True craftsmanship in custom woodworking is a dying art, but for Larry Melberg, owner of Accent Custom Components in Appleton, it’s the only way he believes in crafting products for his customers.
Founded in 1987, Accent’s primary product was custom cabinetry and other woodworking products, something Melberg did for about five years. Though he loved being his own boss, there are certain securities that come with being someone’s employee. So he sold most of his equipment and went to work for someone else. But after only two years he began longing for the independence and flexibility that comes with being self employed, so he started the company up again. This time around he focused primarily on making pizza peels.
What exactly are pizza peels, you ask? It’s a question Melberg gets asked quite a bit.
Accent Pizza Peels are flat, smooth, shovel-like tools used to slide pizzas and yeast breads onto and off of a baking stone or baking sheet in an oven. They are handcrafted and designed with beveled edges to easily and without mess “peel the pizza off of the baking surface,” said Melberg. The word “peel” is also used because the products are made from peeled, natural and untreated basswood.
Soon after he started back in business for himself, Melberg made a connection with someone who advertised in one of the same publications he did. That connection helped him hook up with a restaurant supplier, who subsequently gave him a significant order for several hundred pizza peels per year. With such a sizeable order, Melberg began buying large, capital equipment once again in 1997, including a CNC router, a computerized, numerical controlled machine that assists with production.
“With a machine like that, you don’t have to have as many employees on a regular basis,” he said. But, as luck would have it, once the volume for the pizza peels became even larger, the buyer decided to give the business to an overseas entity where the production costs were considerably less and he could make a greater profit.
“We were left without any of the sales volume, so what we ended up doing was talking to a few people and some of my own connections here in the Valley that I had from my custom cabinet work. That brought me some more custom cabinet work.”
So he’s now back doing cabinets as well as pizza peels.
“I always enjoyed making any kind of wood products, whether it was a bookcase or a cutting board,” Melberg said. “I never really thought I’d be doing custom kitchens, but it kind of evolved into that.”
A one-man band
As you may already have gathered, Melberg, like so many small business owners, has had the usual share of ups and downs in business, but overall he has seen volume grow. With that growth, he has had some employees over the years – as many as seven at one time – but now prefers to keep it limited to just himself and his family.
Currently his two sons, Nathan and Andrew, are helping him part-time in the business, something they’ve done since they were about 14 or 15 years old. Beyond that, Melberg outsources certain jobs. That works out best for him, at least for now.
“It just seems like everyone has their own methods of doing things,” Melberg said, adding that other approaches don’t always mesh with the way he wants to do projects. Since his name and reputation are on the line, he prefers to do the work himself.
“If you try to bring people in who don’t have any experience, you get them trained and then it seems they go someplace else. And the guys that are already semi-skilled, they’re always looking for a better opportunity, too. So you take on a workload to support the number of people you have and then when they leave, you have no people or fewer than normal and you’re having to work a lot of extra hours to make up for the people you lost.”
“The cabinet industry has really gotten to be more of an outsourced industry anyway,” he continued. “There’s still a lot of people in the Valley who build cabinets piece by piece, but there’s also places out there where they’ll call themselves cabinetmakers. But if you walk in there, their warehouse is clean; there’s no tools, because all they do is buy the pieces and parts and assemble them.”
Melberg’s current product line in the Fox Valley consists mostly of custom cabinet work for kitchens or offices, or other rooms in a home where cabinets and woodworking is desired. The work he does runs the gamut from work in average single-family homes to high-end, luxurious homes. But no matter what kind of home he works on, he tries to give customers the best use space and the best value for the money.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a small 1,000-square foot ranch or a 5,000-square foot (mansion),” he said. “We always try to make sure we’re conscious of their budget according to their needs and make sure that they get what they pay for.”
While he will probably always do some amount of custom cabinetry work, Melberg said he really wants to make the pizza peel line his primary business, mainly because between the labor situation and the way the cabinetry industry has become less of an artisan skill and more of an assembly-type of a commodity, it has become harder to make a profit doing custom cabinetry work.
“I always like doing it because I like the creativity of it, but it just seems like because it’s become a lost art it’s tough to find the customer base that really appreciates true custom cabinetry,” he said.
Reaching out in retail
On a national level, Melberg sells the pizza peels, “which we’d like to be able to expand to also include utility type cutting boards.”
“The sky’s the limit on where I’d like to see it go. It’s a very easy product line to build and there’s less variables involved in it than there is with custom cabinet work,” he said, adding that he’d eventually like the pizza peels to be about 80 percent of his business and custom cabinetry about 20 percent. “But it’s just the opposite right now.”
He understands as his pizza peel business grows, he will likely have to hire employees again, but “I believe it’d be easier to find people to do work on pizza peels than on custom cabinet work. Because you can standardize your methods of production and create a systemized approach to manufacturing.”
Building his pizza peels business means reaching out to the retail consumer market, not exactly the same set of skills as woodworking.
Accent Pizza Peels can be found at Cook’s Corner in Green Bay and The Wire Whisk in Appleton. Melberg also has a Web site where he sells the pizza peels and would like to find other ways to market them, but finding the time is a challenge.
“When you’re a one man operation you’re always either building product or buying materials to build the product,” he explained. “So that leaves you little to nothing for time.”
The owner of Cook’s Corner has told Melberg as soon as he’s ready he can get him national exposure and a national rep. About three years ago, Cook’s Corner helped him make a connection with a purchasing representative from a Chicago wholesaler who sold them to Crate & Barrel. That relationship led to Melberg making 4,800 in 2009 and more than 10,000 peels for them during the course of a six-month period.
“But because there was also a difference of opinion with the distributor in Chicago as to how the items would be paid for and when, we decided to discontinue the agreement.”
Melberg said his Web site helped him attract opportunities to produce private-label pizza peels for other distributors.
“For example, I’m producing a peel for a company out East, but it’s considered their product,” he said, adding there are smaller Wisconsin-based companies getting some peels from him right now. Vermont Rolling Pins ordered pizza peels from him and had the product laser engraved with their logo. He hopes to get back into Crate & Barrel again in the future.
“Some days it seems it would be easier to go to work for somebody else again and just punch a clock,” he summarized. “But when I see customers that are pleased and they give me referrals – whether it’s for pizza peels or a custom cabinet job – and I get such satisfaction because the customers are happy, that means I’m doing something right and that makes it all worthwhile to me.”
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