One metal fabrication shop takes on B2C

At Peter Keshishian’s new fab shop, consumers are the intended audience, not project engineers.

Several years ago Peter Keshishian ran a 16-employee sheet metal job shop in Germany, though the product mix was a little odd. The shop fabricated very small runs; one, two, or three pieces were typical. And many of those runs were somewhat simple: a circle, a rectangle, a square, a hat channel. The shop processed about 800 of these small orders a month, each delivered in five to eight days, plus shipping time.

Keshishian’s shop in Germany didn’t sell to other manufacturers. It didn’t follow a business-to-business (B2B) model; it was business-to-consumer (B2C).

Say a person needs a piece of sheet metal to make a strong kickboard for the back door. Sure, some hardware stores have sheet steel available in certain widths, lengths, and thicknesses, but they probably don’t have one cut exactly to fit the door. And if the customer tries to order such a custom-cut sheet from a job shop, delivery can take weeks unless he pays extra for expediting, if the shop accepts the order at all.

“If you buy a product from metal companies, the first question they ask is, ‘How many pieces or tons do you want?’ The consumer never needs tons or a massive number of pieces,” Keshishian said. “He probably needs just one, maybe two pieces. And he also doesn’t need to know about specific grades or chemistries. To the end user, it doesn’t matter. He wants a certain look and feel. All he wants to know is, ‘Can I use this for my project?’ and ‘How easily can I order it?’”

This is Keshishian’s niche. An American citizen, the entrepreneur has since sold his operation in Germany and moved to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Late last year he opened a similar B2C fabrication business, called MetalsCut4U, for the U.S. market. People can visit its website (www.metalscut4u.com), choose a material and its shape (rectangle, circle triangle, ring, etc.), specify basic dimensions (width, length, radius), and receive a quote instantly.

It’s no surprise that before entering the sheet metal business, Keshishian worked in marketing and sales in the IT market. He knew the potential of software. “I wanted to do something different,” he said.

Several factors drive MetalsCut4U’s business model. First, software automates quoting and order processing, which Keshishian said is the company’s intellectual property. It calculates costs and includes packaging and shipping costs based on information from UPS.

Second, the company makes ordering as simple as possible. The website does allow customers to request a quote for a custom part, and they can attach a PDF or CAD file. But usually people choose specifications from drop-down menus: steel, stainless steel, and aluminum materials; 1⁄32-, 1⁄16-, 1⁄8-inch thicknesses; and mirror, brushed, plain, or tread finishes. They have just a few options, not hundreds. Again, consumers are the intended audience, not project engineers at other manufacturers.

From another drop-down menu, they choose the 2-D or 3-D shape: a rectangle, a triangle, a circle, a U-channel, a hat channel, and so on. The 3-D shapes in the drop-down menus incorporate only 90-degree angles (though Keshishian said that the menus may offer shapes with other bend angles in the future).

Customers fill in the dimension information, including which side of the cut and formed sheet is the cosmetic side. They then click a button and get a price, which includes the price for the job and shipping. (Most project dimensions and volumes need to be small enough to be handled by UPS.)

If the customer accepts, he pays via PayPal, and the project is sent to the shop’s backend enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. From there the operation resembles that of many sheet metal job shops. Jobs are grouped by grade and gauges, parts are programmed and nested, and the job is sent to the laser and press brakes.

This keep-it-simple approach helps streamline software development and production, and it also happens to suit the company’s target audience, DIYers.

“Hardly anyone is serving this B2C area,” Keshishian said. “That’s our niche. And I hope that it will be as successful as it has been in Germany.”