The Different Levels of Granite

This is on the different levels of granite. What are these levels? Who made them up? And how do you as a customer understand them and the pricing?

To understand the levels we first have to go to really where the granite comes from. Most of it comes from Brazil. But it does not matter if it is Brazil or India, the quarries do not have level one through five, level A through D, it’s really simplified. They call them basics, exotics, and super exotics.

Super exotics being stuff that is five to ten thousand dollars per slab, which is absolutely semi-precious and ridiculous. So if you whittle it down to an average consumer you are talking about basics and exotics.

The basics are fairly consistent. And the basics line up with level ones for the most part when we kind of come into America, into our system of the supplier system. Where distributors buy it from the quarries and sell them to the fabricators.

Level ones are pretty consistent from supplier to supplier, which are called slab yards, and from fabricator to fabricator, which is us. We have some deviation but not much.

Once you get outside of level one you are into “exotics”, that’s where the price levels become extremely confusing, completely differentiated and completely arbitrary. So the first person that’s setting price levels that you might kind of have contact with is the supplier, also known as the slab yards.

There going to arbitrarily set price levels, whether it’s A through E or one through five because they’re not allowed to give the customer direct pricing. They sell to the wholesalers, the fabricators, and they do not share pricing with the customers. So they made up these price levels which is not accurate and they are different from supplier to supplier just so they can give the customer an idea, just a general idea comparatively when they are looking at one color in the yard vs another color for which one is more expensive.

The fact is, once you are in the exotics every single color is priced differently per square foot for the material. So there is no like price level, there’s no category, whereas a fabricator I’m like ok, a level two is X amount per square foot. some companies try to do that. It is not accurate pricing, and it can overprice things quite often. When we have to get into the higher levels we have to price them just per the color, because they really are a different price per color.

We are on the accurate pricing model where we get a color, we price it per the job completely accurately based on your kitchen. And were not doing price levels that wouldn’t even line up with other companies or other suppliers, to begin with. Because it is not really going to help the consumer who’s out to get a good sense of comparison between company to company.

We are not trying to change the system, we are just trying to do or best to give the consumer a very clean price so they can decide if they want to hire us or hire someone else.