THE STORY OF ELEMAR OREGON
The idea of EleMar Oregon started in 2004 when my partner Jay and I were carpooling to our old engineering jobs at a circuit board plant in Dallas, Oregon. Our commute back then had us in a car together for three hours a day. During all the drive time, we discussed a multitude of business ideas, everything from spin-off businesses within the circuit board manufacturing realm to pizza businesses. Nothing really stuck for more than a few days.
But then, one day, Jay had just returned from a business trip to the East Coast. He said he ran into a colleague in the circuitboard industry who had started a new business importing and distributing stone slabs in Connecticut.
“So Carl says we could start an EleMar warehouse here and they would set us up with their business model, overseas contacts and even show us how to handle the natural stone safely.”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “All I do know is that I don’t know a thing about the stone business, and that stuff is heavy–you know, dangerous.”
But before I knew it, we were on a plane headed to the East Coast. In Connecticut, we toured Carl’s warehouse and gained a lot of insight into how the stone slab business works. The long and short of it was that I was looking for reasons why we shouldn’t do it, but I didn’t find any.
In January of 2005, Jay and I met up and had a cup of coffee; at a 10,000-square-foot warehouse in Tualatin Oregon for which, we had signed a lease. It had previously been some sort of factory and there were all manner of walls and junk we needed to demo and clean out. We also needed to build offices and a showroom. We had a deadline too. Ten containers with our initial inventory were ordered and were on their way. When our first container arrived, two helpful guys flew over from the EleMar’s on the east coast and started training us to safely unload the container and distribute the slabs to A-frames throughout the warehouse.
Both of our families pitched in with the work. After a few months, the warehouse was stocked with our first ten containers of beautiful stone slabs, a simple but elegant showroom, and three offices.
Then Jay and I went shopping for a delivery truck. A survey of our competitors a few months earlier revealed that nobody offered slab delivery to fabricators back then. Each fab had to send one of their employees to those warehouses to sometimes wait an hour or more to be loaded—an employee who could be better used for cutting and installing instead.
So, a few weeks before our opening, Jay and I loaded our new (used) truck with four slabs of our most dazzling colors. We started visiting each and every fabrication company we could locate and invited the owners and their crews out to see our stones – and just as importantly, our shiny delivery truck. “You guys are going to deliver slabs?” they would ask. We just smiled and shook our heads yes.
Our first employee was my daughter Jessica, who had just graduated from Portland State University. She is very intelligent, strong-willed, funny, and pleasant. Jess spent hours on the phone introducing us to fabricators she located throughout the state. She spent even more hours printing up labels for the inventory tracking we had devised and glued each one to each and every slab we had in that initial inventory.
We opened for business on April 1st, 2005. Somehow, opening on April Fool’s Day seemed appropriate. We were about to discover if we were as smart as we thought we were, or just the victims of one of our foolish business ideas spawned in a carpool.
In those early days, “pay-per-click” on Google was still pretty new. And hardly anyone in our industry was taking advantage of it. So it was pretty cheap at the time. In the weeks before our opening, I spent a lot of time picking out keywords that would get us up to the top of the Google search.
And it worked. Opening day was a Friday, and we had a steady flow of customer traffic all day long. The next day, Saturday, was equally promising.
Working long, hard hours makes time pass quickly — and chaotically. It was extremely difficult at times to manage foot traffic, containers, slab deliveries, and phone calls with just two full-time employees (Jess and me) and one part-time employee (Jay, who was still working in circuitboard manufacturing until he could go full-time with us). Occasionally, Jay’s wife Rani would come in on the “off-days” of her job to help with the phones and manage the books. Working seven days a week was often the case for us all. But before we knew it, a year had passed, and our growth was very respectable.
Most importantly, our reputation was beginning to take hold in the market. We spent a lot of extra time working out the details of our slab “hold” process. Being proactive to make sure the right slabs were delivered for any particular job in a timely manner. Taking extra time to educate homeowners about the process of holding slabs, checking with fabricators regarding the project timeline, calling homeowners to confirm and extend holds if needed, and making absolutely sure we kept our promises.
Then came 2008 and the great recession.
Luck has a great deal to do with business success. Sure, being smart and making contingency plans is important, but luck, good or bad, is a key component you cannot fully escape. A good example of this is the fact that in 2008, we had not yet developed any strong accounts with the medium to large construction companies building homes throughout the state. It wasn’t due to a lack of trying. Jay and I had worked consistently to try to win some of those accounts, but it turned out that was a very hard nut to crack. And in this case, when the recession hit and contractors started going out of business with big balances owed to vendors, we were left pretty much unscathed. Plus, we already had a few years of experience running our business on a shoestring. We not only came through it, we continued to grow.
In 2009, we purchased a 21,000 square foot warehouse just around the corner from our original (leased) warehouse in Tualatin, Oregon. It was great that we only had to move our inventory a few blocks, but it still takes the same number of trips, loading, and unloading. And, we still had to manage our deliveries, customer traffic, and unloading containers all at the same time. That and the new warehouse on Teton Ave needed a lot of fixing up. Years of forklift rubber dust seemed to be everywhere, including the lobby and offices. By this time, we had a small crew. Jay was full-time by now with Jessica, Joaquin, and Kurt. More would follow, including Mike, who is now our most senior manager.
As our business grew, Jay and I had many hours together driving to Medford and Bend, Oregon. It wasn’t long before Jay was throwing out ideas for additional warehouses. Our reputation continued to strengthen, and more and more fabricators indicated they would support us if we opened warehouses in their areas. Soon, it was only a matter of time. The challenge was to find suitable warehouse spaces. Medford provided the first opportunity with a fabricator who had additional warehouse space in their building. That initial location proved successful, and a year or so later, we found a suitable building to purchase. It was an old Sears distribution warehouse that had been vacant for years. It needed a lot of work, but it had “good bones.” In September of 2013, we opened our current Medford warehouse with 18,000 square feet under a beautiful wooden beam roof.
Bend, Oregon, was a far more challenging matter. For several years, Jay and I looked at various warehouses throughout the Bend area. Locations were often too tight for trucks to maneuver. The final realization was that Bend was just too limited and too expensive. After we turned our sights to Redmond just up the road, things looked much more promising. Of all places, a location in downtown Redmond became available. It was an old lumber warehouse. As with all our other locations, it required an extensive makeover. And its location next to a popular brewpub with several food carts made the remodel challenging. As I tried to work and direct work, the wafting smells of brewing hops and roasting pulled pork would suddenly invade the warehouse space, making my stomach roar.
In 2017, we opened our Redmond warehouse. It didn’t take long for customers to find us. Because of our customer service model, fabricators in the area seemed eager to send them.
Additional warehouses created a need to build a substantial fleet of trucks to support our business. A tractor-trailer rig was acquired (used, of course) to supply and rotate slabs among our warehouses. Additional delivery trucks were needed as well. The infrastructure to support our business was becoming more and more complex. Soon, we were developing HR services, employee benefits, a robust inventory management system, and work safety programs.
Marketing and advertising were taking a turn, too. We started developing a full-time sales team to canvas fabricators, designers, and retail kitchen and flooring stores. We contracted custom display turnstiles to house samples in retail, fabricator and designer locations. Kerrisa and Jermain soon joined us as a result.
In 2020, I eventually decided to sell my portion of the business to my dear friend and partner, Jay. You remember that little thing I wrote earlier about luck? The world is replete with stories of failed businesses, and a majority of them probably involved failed partnerships. We worked pretty well together for so many years — and I would be a liar if I said it was all smooth and there were no disagreements. But I was very lucky to have stumbled upon such a smart and honest person in my friend Jay. At the end of the day, our settlements were always calculated together, agreed upon, and fair. So in 2020, I retired – well, I semi-retired.
I am officially an employee of the company I helped to create. I work a couple of days a week. I get to keep my fingers on the pulse of the business and visit with so many wonderful people who seem genuinely happy to work for this company. My old business partner and dear friend keeps me apprised of everything, as if I were still one of the bosses. I guess I am an ambassador if nothing else. And that’s just fine with me.
In 2022, my partner purchased a plot of land in Pasco, Washington. Before my retirement, we had already shopped several warehouses in that market. Nothing really fit the bill. So Jay decided to build one from the ground up. It was a long and tedious process. The pandemic and subsequent shortages in steel, permitting processes, and other unexpected things delayed the project over a couple of years.
In 2024, I was honored to help proudly open EleMar Oregon’s fourth warehouse in Tri-Cities, Washington. It truly is a flagship for the company.
And yet still, in the short time between Tri-Cities and now, EleMar has opened up a fabrication tool supply business for our loyal fabricators. With two experienced drivers and delivery vans, we provide the best quality tools and products for on-time, quality workmanship.
I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am of Jay and this company, with all its very talented and hardworking people, past and present. People who are fun-loving and very dedicated. People whom we trust to carry the banner we so carefully crafted in those early days, as we brushed the dust off our clothes while sitting down to plan it all out on scraps of paper and refurbished computers.
There are so many details I have not included in this story—the many trips overseas to factories of varying qualities. The buying network we established so that our quality standards were met before slabs were loaded onto containers and put on a ship to arrive weeks later. Our little company did all these things and more.
But the most important thing we never lost track of was this. Good customer service builds a reputation that you can grow a substantial business with.
And to that end, we owe all our customers; the myriad of homeowners, fabricators, builders, designers, retailers, and the cities in which each of our warehouses reside, a debt of gratitude.
We couldn’t have done it without all of you.
Thank you.
© Darrel Boyd, dB, EleMar Oregon, April 1, 2025