Unique WoodWorx November Newsletter

How can Unique WoodWorx offer truly custom cabinets at an equal or lower price than big box stores? Are they not trying to make a profit from their work, and if so, how are they able to profit from jobs when offering cabinets made with better quality, more expensive materials at a lower price then big box stores? This almost seems suspicious (too good to be true) especially when the cabinets show up to your jobsite pre-assembled and ready to install. You don’t have to unpack them from a box, read the instructions to assemble each cabinet, then try to assemble with only the parts that are included, (which can be a nightmare). These cabinets have been assembled by professionals using the full resources of a fully equipped cabinet manufacturing shop. All joints are glued, dadoed, and fastened with nails and screws ensuring they will hold up to the harshest environments. So how can Unique WoodWorx offer this type of cabinet at such a discounted price? The secret to keeping prices for quality cabinets at a reasonable price is in the details. Before saying to yourself "Yeah I've heard this pitch before " let me explain. Step one will be included in this episode and more to follow.

Step 1: Relevant Information Only
 We have found that far too often projects go way over budget simply because of miscommunication and small details being missed, leading to expensive mistakes that could easily be avoided. For example, a common issue might be an end wall by some cabinets showing on the original floor plan, but the client has decided to eliminate it, thus leaving an exposed end on a cabinet that needs to be finished, but since the cabinet manufacturer is not aware of this, the cabinet shows up on the job site with the end unfinished. Maybe someone at the cabinet company was even told about this in a phone conversation and noted it on a piece of paper then the paper was misplaced. This is just one of many such scenarios that factor into every job that goes through a cabinet shop. Often this leads to the blame game and everyone trying to cover their back, but in the end, usually the cabinet company will have to build a new cabinet and have it delivered to the job site. This can be very costly and if it’s happening regularly, any responsible business owner knows that such mistakes, need to be accounted for in the original price in order to have any profit left over after jobs are complete.
   Believe it or not this can often be caused by having too much information about a project, which sounds ridiculous because it is very important to have all the necessary and relevant information for a project. However, too much info is often a factor, especially with younger, more inexperienced designers or project managers. With a large amount of unnecessary information for projects, it can be overwhelming to try and sort through all of it and gather only the relevant information. Often inexperienced employees have a challenging time determining what information is relevant and what is not, so they will either save everything to be safe or will only save what they believe to be useful information, which is great if they know what info is useful. Often, this results in important information being discarded as well and that usually leads to very expensive mistakes. Of course, if they do save everything, it can nearly be the same as if they had deleted it, since who is really going to look through mounds of data just to ensure nothing has been missed and every note and detail has been accounted for. Who even has time to do that in today’s fast-paced world?
 So how can we avoid this from happening? Should we only hire experienced employees? If so, where do you find good, experienced employees that do not already have good jobs? As we all know, even experienced employees can and will make mistakes and such employees are hard to come by, so that is not really a realistic solution. So, we needed to find a way to minimize mistakes that would work with employees of all experience levels. For this we started with creating templates and checklists for all jobs that would be easy to use and understand. In recent years with the rapid advancement in AI technology we are now able to significantly improve in efficiency and narrow down on mistakes using the power of AI Technology. This in turn has cut down our cost of mistakes and allows us to offer lower prices to our customers. You would be incredibly surprised at how much of the average cabinet manufacturing companies’ cost, is simply in fixing mistakes.
  To make a long story short, the trick is in doing a job right the first time and only doing it once. Not, rushing through it focused on max speed the first time, then having to fix little nagging issues and redoing things multiple times. Of course, we also miss things and make mistakes but try to learn from them and check if there is anything we can change in our templates or AI models, to avoid the mistake happening again. If changes need to be made, we do so immediately, to hopefully not have anyone make the same mistake again. By doing this we have been able to significantly reduce the cost of mistakes and remakes which in turn allows us to offer a much higher quality product, at often lower prices than manufacturers producing budget cabinets, made with much cheaper material. Of course, it’s impossible to reach the 100% mistake free zone, but we believe that staying focused on avoiding mistakes as much as possible is a solid first step, and a huge factor in our ability to deliver top quality products to our customers, at reasonable prices. 

Stay tuned to the Unique WoodWorx Newsletter and our blog for Step 2.



I hope you have enjoyed reading and would love to hear any thoughts or comments.