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You all having the same issue with Cambria? We have had two customer choose Cambria, they are willing to wait four weeks but then Cambria changes their mind and adds another four weeks.
Customer think we are lying to them.Anyone else having the same issue?I’m always careful about talking about Cambria on any forum like this. There are a lot of hard feelings with particularly Midwest fabricators over how they were treated by that company. I can’t blame them after hearing what went down, either. It is a sore spot, so I always avoided talking about that company. I say this as a strong seller of that product. They are about 90% of my quartz sales.
Having said that, Cambria has become the classic example of a victim of it’s own success. Better designs, smarter marketing (one price point? excellent! others are now climbing on that model). They are a smaller, family owned company that made decisions by person, rather than committee. All was well until they really took off.
This is where a Cosentino or a DuPont has it all over them. A major corporation would have anticipated the increase in demand and adjusted early for it. I don’t think Cambria reacted until it was far too late. The urge to milk what you have past when you should have expanded works for a while, but have one line problem, or one geographical area increase sales by a large margin and the system falls apart.
It didn’t help that we would get different explanations for what the problem was. Don’t tell us anything but the straight deal and we will give you slack. Tell us this or that, only to have circumstances prove you wrong is no way to go through life, son. The last straw was bragging about getting a new factory online and giving us the impression that all would be well this past spring or early summer. We are now hearing stories about some colors being out of stock till February 2014 or later.
Someone needs to be fired, and soon. They won’t be the first brand that had a great product but failed as a business.
I will start by saying that we love the Cambria colors. The people are very nice, like our sales rep and regional managers.
Our issue is that when we call, we know the color is on backorder. Fine, but give us the correct date. Don’t tell us four weeks and it ends up being eight. That is a huge problem.
If it weren’t for the nice folks, great pricing structure and excellent colors, we would have thrown them out the door months ago. You can’t run a small business with integrity when it appears that we are lying to our customers. They don’t forget this type of thing and it taints their otherwise wonderful experience.
Right now I’m waiting on a color that I’m told will take 8 weeks to come in. I hope they don’t extend it like they did for Andy.
Steve,
Prep the customer now. I just heard they had some difficulty with some material. Added four weeks to our install date.
What color is it?
The one we’re waiting on this time is Praa Sands, estimated arrival is the beginning of December. About a year ago it was the color Parys that had about a two month lead time.
Now I’m hearing about a price increase. My supplier says it’s from Cambria and they are passing it on. Has anyone else heard this?
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