Business View Magazine Jan-2019

52 with the somewhat hidden Clarke name. “That business grew for us in the ‘90s and into the early 2000s, and continued to grow up until about 2009.Then, there was the recession and that had an adverse effect on the housing and remodeling industry.Our business took a dramatic drop, as did most of our competitors, and it took a number of years to stabilize.The effect of that recession was dramatic and long-lasting, but we’re finally coming back to volume levels that we had observed before 2009. “In 2014,we established a new division in the company called Clarke Architectural, and this was devoted entirely to solid surface products,which are different from the acrylic products that defined us up to that point. Solid surface is, essentially, a cast product - the closest similarity would be Corian. It’s a resin, filtered with different kinds of filler like alu- minum tri-hydrate, in our case, poured into parallel molds and cured with catalysts, and then further cured and matured with heating ovens.This was a relatively small segment, but it was not well-popu- lated by competitors. “We moved into it with a different approach.We decided to be aggressive and bold with our designs to make products that were, heretofore, not avail- able.And that worked out quite well for us.We got a lot of attention because our designs were unique. We pursued a quality design initiative and we re- ferred to our products as ‘museum quality functional art.’That business is growing rapidly and we con- tinue to put a lot of resources into it, and what we see is an ever-increasing area of opportunity.We’re getting ready to show at the Kitchen and Bath Show in Las Vegas, a new line of solid surface shower pans,which will be unique for us.There have been some in the market, before, but they’ve usually been size-specific, based on certain projects.We’re going