July 2018

56 57 rooms are a huge draw for walk-in traffic–DIY customers and hobbyists who buy the products onsite. The company also sells to boat builders, fabricators, and composite trades alike who pur- chase products to repair or build items for their own customers. FGCI also does a considerable business with the entertainment sector – a lot of façade work in Florida for restaurants and projects for theme parks in the amusement industry. For resellers who want to sell FGCI products under their own branding, FGCI offers private labelling and will do special development work to provide customers with exactly what they need, whether it’s a spe- cial formulated product or an add-on. According to Higman, “We look at each segment of our busi- ness as a specialty and have appropriate people available to support customers in each area. The walk-in showrooms and internet sales are the busiest for transactions; but volume-wise, most sales are to OEMs, fabricators, and custom build- ers of products.” Carrying an immense inventory of over 30,000 items for distribution requires massive warehous- FIBERGLASS COATINGS INC. ing facilities. For FGCI, that amounts to more than 120,000 square feet of total space, with a larger selection of products than any of the standard composite distributors. Geographically, FGCI has a fleet of delivery trucks that deliver to the entire state of Florida and southern Georgia. The com- pany also services the Caribbean, South America, across the U.S. and Canada, and other parts of the world. FGCI’s success is credited in part to pricing the product appropriately for the user. Higman ex- plains, “A lot of hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers need to be walked through what they’re doing; we provide that support and offer a product that’s still competitively priced. And we also do some things that the industry doesn’t typically do, such as incoming quality control (QC) on all our prod- ucts to make sure they’re within manufacturer specifications before we send them out.” According to Higman, it’s a problem in the industry–products that don’t meet specifications, and no one knows it until they reach the end user. It can be very expensive for the customer and the supplier if the product is returned or causes prob-