By ANDREW WAREING
Northern Ontario Business
While many company executives might be doing handsprings about a 600-per-cent increase in business growth over three years, Laclu Industries president Rex Csuzdi’s attitude is fairly casual.
Laclu Industries, located in the tiny community of Laclu about 20 kilometres west of Kenora, has a single product which can be found at several hundred Home Hardware stores across Canada - the Victorian-style “door in a box,” a build-your-own front door kit. Since starting up in 2000, the company’s revenues have spurted from $100,000 a year to about $600,000 per year with revenues expected to reach $1 million by the end of this year.
Not bad for a couple of guys with no previous manufacturing experience, one might say.
“It’s really quite interesting,” Csuzdi says. “The facility we’re operating out of used to be a retail building supply store that I operated. But, after 20 years, I was getting tired of the retail business. I was burning out. My partner (Kelly Gibson) was a lodge owner. He was starting to get tired of the lodge business. One day, he came in asking me what I was planning to do for the summer.”
Gibson’s father previously sold sweater-making kits and Gibson was thinking about reviving the kit again. He told Csuzdi about it and, over the course of the conversation, the kit evolved into a kit to build a door.
“It was a big light-bulb moment,” says Csuzdi. “We picked two designs that we liked and those are the only designs we sell.”
The two decided to take a risk with the venture and purchase more than enough equipment to be able to scale up production as it became necessary - assuming, of course that it would become necessary.
With his building supply experience, Csuzdi was certain it would be necessary.
“Our end user is a real variety of people,” says Csuzdi. “We know in this area they go to a lot of cottages, but there are also consumers that have screen doors on their home. This has always been in my mind because I know from being in the building supply business that doors undergo so much damage frequently just from going from Point A to Point B.”
They made contact with the local representative of Home Hardware who introduced the pair to the company, which made arrangements to introduce the product into its stores. Laclu now has product in 300 of Home Hardware’s 1,100 stores nationwide, with displays for 500 more being developed.
The company has since penned an agreement with American home improvement giant Lowes, which is test-marketing the product on a limited basis on both coasts. Another independent distributor has also come on board with plans to test markets throughout the States.
For now, Csuzdi says although the pair has prototyped a number of other potential new products, they are comfortable with the business as it stands now.
But new opportunities are always a phone call away, he says.
www.doorinabox.com
