Shop visit
In the early days of his business, Gary Passavanti was like a lot of other small cabinet shop owners, selling one kitchen at a time and saying goodbye to
Shop Snapshot
Company name: Ideas in Wood
Location: Ramona and Julian, Calif. Proprietors: Gary and Lynn Passavanti
Year founded: 1979, incorporated in 2001
Primary products: residential cabinetry, furniture
Annual sales: $1.7 million Number of employees: 14 full time (including owners), 3 part time Shop size: 7,200 square feet (includes storage
Key equipment:
➤ Planit Solutions’ Cabinet Vision software
➤ Stema sliding table saw
➤ Unique door machine
➤ Grizzly shapers
his customers. And, like others, his shop, Ideas in Wood, has had to contend with competition from big-box stores. But instead of trying to compete with their lower prices, he learned a lesson.
“I saw a lot of my counterparts go down the tube trying to compete head-on with Home Depot, which you can’t do,” says Gary. “We’re not trying to pattern ourselves after Home Depot. We just learned a lot from them.”
Using the big-box stores as inspiration, Gary and his wife Lynn created a design center, located in Ramona, Calif. Customers can come to the retail store to design and buy their kitchen cabinets and choose countertops. While in the store, the same customer may also buy a dining room set, occasional tables, hutch, entertainment center, any type of home office furniture and maybe even an art piece.
“We’ve really developed the key to success with all this stuff. We’ve only had a 10-month year, because we moved the cabinet shop and lost two months worth of work. Our sales have gone up in 2006 in a year
Shop Video
where everyone else in Southern California is having declining sales,” says Gary. “We’re working smarter.”
The bigger stores are selling people all sorts of other stuff, says Gary. The shop already had a small retail outlet in Julian, Calif. That store is only 900 square feet, too small to show the company’s kitchens. “When we decided that we were going to bite the bullet and open up this second store, we were going
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