By the time you read this, Vast Enterprises will have enjoyed a moment in the national spotlight—a Today show segment featuring the company’s landscape pavers and deck pavers that aired April 29, and then another product feature on the Discovery channel’s Renovation Nation soon after. Why the excitement over pavers?
Maybe because, as Vast Enterprises CEO Andy Vander Woude says, his company is really a “cleantech” business. Sometimes three-year-old Vast also calls itself a “materials science research company.”
“We’ve developed a foundational technology,” Vander Woude says, a “‘composite masonry,’ which is basically an engineered alternative to concrete and clay products” like pavers and bricks. Vander Woude is one of four company founders, two of whom had long careers in precision plastics and developed a way to recycle car tires and plastic into durable, attractive pavers. Vast Enterprises came to market two years ago with its first landscape pavers and was able to price them competitively with concrete pavers—in part because an underlying grid system interlocks with the pavers and turns an installation project into a “Lego set,” Vander Woude says. Minneapolis-based Vast claims it can reduce contractors’ installation time by 30 to 50 percent compared to standard pavers.
Vast is not so vast yet: a second round of angel financing underway, six employees, and projected revenues of $2 million in 2009. But it’s launching a strategic partnership with Savage-based Fabcon this spring to add Vast’s new “thin brick” façade to Fabcon’s prefabricated concrete walls. And as Vander Woude points out in a late April interview, “the construction season in the Midwest is just getting underway.”
