In the old days—just a couple of years ago—Marvin Windows and Doors, where Susan Marvin is president, had plenty of customers who wanted Marvin, only Marvin, and nothing but Marvin products. The company had built a reputation for doing high-end and custom work. If it had to bid for jobs, it typically faced only a few competitors.
Now, Susan Marvin says, every millwork company in town knows about every construction permit: “There are so few pulled, everybody is all over them.”
Even worse, people just aren’t building the kind of high-end homes that they used to—homes that were tailor made for Marvin’s premium products. “Even if they have money, there’s a psychological pullback. It’s a very different market,” Marvin says.
But she’s not interested in making her 97-year-old family business into a different company to compete in this new market. Marvin windows and doors are not found in big-box stores like Lowe’s or Home Depot, and they are rarely used in big developments such as those put up by Pulte. “Our customers are smaller independents” Marvin says, “lumber dealers, home stores, and window dealers whose customers in turn are independent remodelers and custom builders who will build between one and 25 homes per year.”
One of her company’s largest competitors, Andersen Corporation based in Bayport, has “gone very vertical,” Marvin says. “They have a window at every price point.” While the current economy creates pressure to follow suit, that would be allowing a relatively short-term crisis to cloud her company’s long-term vision of itself. “That takes you down into a market that we’ve chosen to stay away from,” Marvin says. “We’re a premier supplier, not a commodity supplier. We’re really good at marketing premier products. We’d be lost if we got into the commodity market.”
So, in an environment that offers slim opportunities—“the lowest levels of new construction since World War II,” according to an analyst at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies—Marvin Windows and Doors is voluntary slicing away and rejecting much of the potential business that’s out there. It’s not because the company expects a quick economic recovery. It’s because the company knows what it is.
Last March, at a quarterly all-employees meeting at Marvin headquarters in Warroad, Susan Marvin didn’t sugarcoat her message: “I essentially delivered the news that we see no indication of a turnaround—and that there’s no reason to think it’s going to improve any time soon.” She was interrupted several times by applause. “Just when you’re expecting people to get really frustrated or mad or sad, you get a very different response,” she says.
Marvin Windows and Doors has closed no facilities and made no layoffs to help it through this downturn. Instead, the company is relying on innovative products, adherence to its brand and core abilities, and the support of its work force and community to see it through to better times.
