Porcelain (Rockton) marketing overview 2023-March

 Porcelain (Rockton) marketing overview 2023-March

The porcelain market is a new market for me, and we started exploring and developing this product market in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. The past three years of the pandemic have been very challenging for us in terms of market development.

I primarily do B2B sales, and initially, most of my contacts were countertop factories. Many traditional countertop workshops did not participate much in porcelain processing, mainly because most porcelain slabs have a thickness of 12mm, 9mm, 6mm, or even 4mm, which adds a lot of difficulty and uncertainty to the equipment that fabricators use for the fabrication of quartz products. Therefore, they mostly refuse to fabricate such products. Later, because I had contact with some tile setters who were more familiar with this type of product and had already developed a sizable installation capacity in the market, they were more willing to work with us. However, most of them mainly work on small sizes, such as 3 feet x 8 feet, while what we sell, 126” x 63”, is rare. Large sizes like this mostly require heavy equipment such as a bridge saw or water jet to better display their characteristics.

I think that in terms of material wholesale, having porcelain can indeed increase sales revenue and market share, but the scattered customer base on diverse processing modes also brings certain difficulties to sales. This aspect needs to be further strengthened and classified.

We have also encountered many problems in transportation and gained a lot of experience, so our delivery service even includes delivering directly to the construction site, rather than just delivering to fabrication shops as before. However, personally, I still prefer to deliver to fabrication shops. The terrain at the construction site is complex and varied. And the driver may not be able to handle every case, and there are transportation risks. The construction site situation can also be much more complicated, such as interaction and communication with construction workers, which can lead to transportation success or failure.

Many tile companies are also willing to pick up the porcelain themselves, but due to the mismatch between their pick-up equipment standards and our company’s equipment standards, picking up the porcelain in our warehouse is not always smooth.

Since porcelain can be widely used, designer involvement is also essential. Most end-users are still limited to using large color combinations only for flooring, so it is challenging for end customers to decide on color series themselves.

 

One of our shortcomings is that we still lack in the field of exterior walls, and most of our products are still limited to interior design. This is also related to our own product design patterns and changes. I believe that after these years of experience accumulation and market feedback, we should try our best to summarize which products are currently popular and which ones have already gone out of style. The quartz products market has made significant leaps and bounds in the past three years of the pandemic, let alone the porcelain market.

It is already two months into 2023, and I have seen more and more companies willing to try porcelain fabrication. This is gratifying, and we have also made further progress in porcelain sales. This also allows me to see the fast pace of material updating and iteration, with updates and iterations happening roughly every five years.

The above is my personal summary of porcelain marketing. Please correct me if there are any mistakes. Thank you for your support.