Monument Retailers Rely on Old-fashioned Word-of-mouth with Latest High-tech Tools

July 27, 2001

COLMA, Calif. - Like many of his colleagues, Chris Vierhaus of the American Monumental Company considers his vocation just as much an art, founded on tradition and craftsmanship, as it is a business.

Vierhaus' firm, which sells memorial markers and monuments, was previously managed by his father, Josef, a master stonecutter who emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1960.

"My dad literally could cut anything out of stone with a hammer and chisel," says Vierhaus. "It is a skill that very few people have today and something that's not taught anymore."

Vierhaus represents the latest generation of stone and memorialization craftsmen using diamond saws and sandblasters that spit fine gravel in a continuous high-velocity stream to etch letters and scenes over stencils on granite monuments.

Although the production process has changed over the years, many other aspects of Vierhaus' business are run like they were. Marketing, for example, relies primarily on word-of-mouth. And Vierhaus is not alone. Many monument companies have been in the same business for generations, tend to be family owned and shun aggressive marketing campaigns or sales promotions out of sensitivities.

"Death care is a very serious matter," says Ron Westbrook of Visalia Granite & Marble Works in Visalia, Calif. "We're the oldest locally owned business in town, 110 years, and you get the feel of your own town and understand the needs of the community."

"We've been relying on referrals borne from our strong name recognition for over a century," says David Bott of the Mark H. Bott Company in Ogden, Utah. Bott's firm was founded by his great-grandfather 126 years ago before Utah became a state.

In an era when people don't live in the same communities for a lifetime, change jobs every two or three years and relationships are more transient, monument companies thrive on their personalized works carved on granite that can last for centuries.

Vierhaus' high-profile projects include the monument of Wyatt Earp and mausoleums of Joe DiMaggio and Rhoda Goldman, the late scion of the Levi Strauss family. To keep crowds from milling around the DiMaggio mausoleum, Vierhaus' crew placed the footstone with the name of the baseball great a day before the Impala Black granite building with fluted columns was completed in 1999. "Nobody knew it was the DiMaggio mausoleum until the footstone was installed," says Vierhaus.

The Goldman mausoleum from afar looks like a dome suspended in the air. The granite octagonal dome is supported on a circular wall of glass framed by stainless steel tubes. "Completing the project was like solving an algebra problem that required great precision in assembling granite, steel and glass without a single measurement error," says Vierhaus.

Vierhaus procures all of his granite from the nation's largest quarrier and manufacturer, Minnesota-based Cold Spring Granite Company, offering more than 100 granite colors and operates 30 quarries in North America.

Aside from the increasing demand for mausoleums, Vierhaus says he has also seen a rise in upright instead of flat stone markers. "People want to remember their loved ones with memorials that stand out with distinct colors, contours and etchings."

Vierhaus estimates 90 percent of his orders come via word-of-mouth through recognition from serving a community that has 21 cemeteries, seven monument makers and residents whose religious and ethnic affiliations are Buddhist, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Moslem, African, Armenian, Arab, Chinese, European, Japanese and Russian. "We have our own world here," says Vierhaus.

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For more information about monument retailers and to interview Ron Westbrook, David Bott and Chris Vierhaus, contact Linda Mathiasen at LMathiasen@coldspringgranite.com.

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