"I'm interested in developing some highly designed pieces and in producing them in mass quantities at an economical level," Hertz says. But the problem remains that Syndecrete doesn't readily lend itself to mass production. The company's tiny line of home decorations (vases, bowls, tabletops, soap holders) is sold directly to one catalog merchant -- instant cash flow, but barely profitable. Still, Hertz has taught himself enough about breaking even to have canceled production on a set of bowls when the pace of orders at a recent trade show suggested they wouldn't recapture fixed costs soon enough. "I never thought that way before," he admits. "In the early years, if I felt it was a beautiful object, I'd just make it."
Other studies at the Hertz School of Business include marketing and accounting, which the school's star pupil pledges he will have completed by the time this article appears. Until then, Hertz won't push for growth. "I haven't felt ready to go for aggressive sales forecasts," he says. "The last thing I want to do is sell a lot at a loss."
By now he's resigned to Syndecrete's relatively high price structure. Sold straight out of the factory, with no middleman markup, the product is still at a level where some 60% of potential clients for whom Syndesis generates proposals reply that they love the product but regret they can't afford it. If Syndesis can't manufacture competitively -- and it's doubtful it can, given set-in-concrete labor and materials costs that commodities such as granite and marble don't suffer -- Hertz knows he has to convince customers his stuff is worth the extra dough. That's where corporate design -- the business subject he's learned best -- comes in.
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Hertz starts the process of communication by sending prospective clients an elaborate four-color brochure. "From the mailing label, to the way it's packaged, through the pieces of identity inside," he says, "customers can tell we're no uninitiated precaster, that we're a business architects and builders can relate to."
The recipient can request specific information by checking items off a list on the response card enclosed in the brochure. What arrives next is likely to be printed on cocoa-toned stock and wrapped in corrugated cardboard -- a curiously drab setting that risks being dismissed as the budgetary concession of a business short of funds. Hertz appreciates that his back-to-basics approach treads a fine line between sophistication and out-and-out cheapness. "Unless you do each element sensitively, so it's a recognizable part of the theme," he says, "it looks as if you're cutting corners."
In Syndesis's bootstrapped beginnings, standards were indeed tempered by economic necessity. "We bought rolls of that corrugated stuff," Hertz recalls of his early days, when he operated out of a garage, "because it was incredibly cheap, yet it made for interesting packaging." He still buys rolls of the stuff, he says, simply because "I rather like the aesthetic." A major difference: visual interest in the otherwise lackluster cardboard has been introduced by means of a cutaway, each one scooped out by hand, that reveals an address label.
The rough-finished binder that holds Syndecrete data also seems to be the mark of a tightfisted operation. Unbeknownst to the recipient, however, it costs about three times more than the usual vinyl-covered model. The extra cost is to get the manufacturer to interrupt its production run and not apply tacky plastic. "It costs more to get less," Hertz acknowledges -- meaning for raw goods, not cultivated effect.
Hertz has to be the only merchant in the world who delivers marketing matter on butcher paper, the same utilitarian stuff your rib roast is wrapped in. He considers butcher paper's suggestively stark ("Read this!") and grainy (like Syndecrete itself) veneer more suitable than conventional bond for presenting certain printed information. So much so that he doggedly shopped among grocery suppliers rather than printing-paper mills for a bulk supplier. "If I asked a mill for the effect I wanted," he says, "they'd have come up with some premium-priced designer paper speckled to look like granite. I got real speckles at a small fraction of the price."
The butcher's shop theme is echoed by rugged meat-locker doors that seal manufacturing off from office space at Syndesis headquarters. Through them pass clients, invited to examine and critique work in process. Inside the manufacturing area, where Syndecrete is being made, visitors are immersed in monochrome, as if they're in a movie that's suddenly turned black-and-white. Everything in view -- walls, forklifts, stepladders, company-supplied uniforms for employees -- has been unstintingly rendered gray. Hertz calls it his "battleship aesthetic," and, of course, it serves a function. "Some companies have well-designed interiors, but the design stops on the manufacturing floor; we put a lot of money into making sure the workplace is not only safe but also attractive for customers." Consciously or not, the workers respond to the orderliness of it all by not leaving tools lying around, returning them instead to their appointed places in the storeroom.
Nor does Hertz's notion that everything matters stop there. On the street, Syndesis trucks have logos stenciled on by an expensive procedure that makes them look as though they've been chiseled into the doors. Even the tool kits Syndecrete installers take to the field have been neatly dressed with Syndesis logos. The message: if we take this much trouble for us, think what we'll do for our customers.
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Stuffed with information, the cardboard binder, arriving inside one of the ubiquitous corrugated sleeves, is engineered to end up on clients' shelves. "In architects' offices," Hertz says, "if you give them a two-dimensional container, they'll place it in a file drawer, where it's never seen again. But they can't file a three-ring binder, so it goes to the general library for everyone to use as a reference." Not only that, but when Syndesis does follow-up mailings, the binder is the obvious place for recipients to stow the materials.
Not every element was deemed unfailing by the design-award judges, however. One downgrade was earned by the logo. "The product is brilliant, and the use of the corrugated material makes you stop and read about it," says Woody Pirtle, and his fellow judges agree. "Unfortunately, the identity -- the logotype -- suffers from what's happening in the design industry today with regard to typography." Specifically, Pirtle regretted that the typeface of Syndecrete had been "squeezed beyond recognition" of its classic Futura origins. Hertz, though, favors the choice on three grounds: (1) its individuality asserts that the product "isn't an imitation of anything"; (2) an instantly recognizable logo hastens brand-name identification; (3) its pronounced ruggedness "gives the idea of building blocks, like a Stonehenge."
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Hertz loves photocopy machines, but more for graphic than economic ends. Rather than directly submitting a photograph to a client, Hertz may scan it through a laser printer, then photocopy the output into a high-contrast third generation. "A photocopy has an immediacy, as if it's just been imprinted," he says, "whereas a glossy photo can look too finished." And, of course, like everyone else's.
