Patience may be a virtue, but after waiting months or more, you can’t blame even the most patient suppliers and shoppers for throwing their hands up in frustration as they wait for deliveries of stone that seems like it will never come.
Most people are aware of the congestion happening at American ports due to delays and the increase in demand. And while many major ports increased their hours, this just created pressure on other links in the global supply chain—there is a shortage of employees to work at these ports, there’s a shortage of truck drivers to move goods from the ports to delivery. Plus, there is a lack of warehouse inventory space and ever-increasing rental rates for these spaces.
The supply chain — highly complex, fractured, and multinational— is clearly broken, and there’s no easy fix. It didn’t break overnight, and it won’t be fixed overnight either. And while brilliant minds are on a quest of how, if possible, to make the supply chain stronger and more resilient, there’s another simpler solution. Buy from companies, like Polycor, who have always provided local product sourcing options.
During the years of rapid globalization, many companies moved their production overseas to benefit from cheaper labor and material costs. And now home builders are struggling to obtain materials, slowing down their projects and driving up costs at the same time. This has implications for commercial real estate too, from building material shortages in the development phase of projects, to rethinking strategies around offshoring production. The supply chain situation is just as concerning for smaller businesses used to operating on a for-order basis or that rely on just-in-time inventory strategies.
As the global supply chain melted down and the true costs of overseas production became more apparent, bringing production to America— a complicated process known as reshoring — has begun growing in popularity. But companies like Polycor have maintained their own supply chain control all along, invested in their local communities and economies, and avoided rising foreign production costs. That means for us and our customers, all those supply chain issues just don’t matter.
QUOTE ABOUT SUPPLY CHAIN
Our supply chain is robust, well developed, and transparent. Importing stone via the tangled global supply chain has many problems beyond the recent delivery woes caused by transportation from abroad.
We believe that manufacturing world-class natural stone can have a positive impact on people and planet. If you believe in defending children and human rights, you can’t look the other way when those rights are violated to quarry stone. That’s our stance, and we think it’s most people’s too.
The average shopper isn’t aware of the unethical and exploitative child labor practices that tarnish the overseas stone industry when shopping for granite or marble. They go into a store and choose a slab that fits their style and budget. They don’t know if it was mined by children or slave labor, or even what country it came from (a lot of times the distributor doesn’t even know that for sure). And even if the distributor might know where it came from, they can’t always know the conditions it was quarried in, or what could have taken place as the stone took the global journey from the quarry to the store.
From the bedrock to cutting slabs to point-of-sale and finally to delivery, Polycor maintains unbroken ownership of our entire supply chain. And while we are the largest quarrier of natural stone in the world, we use our global footprint to maximize local impact. We are the largest producer of natural stone in North America, with 17 plants and over 50 quarries here, including:
- Adams quarry, Bloomington, Indiana
- Bethel White quarry, Bethel, Vermont
- Empire quarry, Oolitic, Indiana
- Eureka quarry – Bedford, Indiana
- Georgia Marble quarries and plant, Tate, Georgia
- Victor quarry, Bloomington, Indiana
So, unlike many stone distributors who source slabs from international suppliers and then pretend they are their materials, when it comes to Polycor, everything is genuinely ours. And we provide jobs in these communities where we are located. Most of our quarries have been in operation since the 1800s, giving Americans — especially veterans — opportunities for safe, stable jobs for generations.
QUOTE HERE ABOUT OUR AWESOME LOCAL EMPLOYEES
With more than 80% of a company’s environmental impact in its supply chain, moving from overseas suppliers to regional partner networks has the added benefit of being environmentally friendly. Caring for the planet has been an important part of our business for generations, too. We consider ourselves stewards of the environment, and recently committed to becoming carbon neutral by the end of 2025. We’re the first natural stone quarrier to make a firm commitment to carbon neutrality, and among the first in the manufacturing industry to take a leadership role on the essential work of decarbonization.
According to the National Retail Federation, nearly 80% of consumers say sustainability is important to them, and more than 70% are willing to pay more if it means the products they are purchasing are sustainable.
QUOTE ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY EFFORTS
Specify with confidence and bring your client’s designs to life with Polycor’s ready-to-ship stone. Limestone, granite, marble and more, are available with short lead times — and without any of the uncertainty and hassle of product coming from overseas.
