Beyond the façade

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There’s more beauty than meets the eye with Allura USA’s building products, especially when it comes to delivering superior service to their highly valuable niche

Allura USA aims to make a material difference for their customers, partners, and for the homeowners who enjoy the beauty and efficiency of their home building products. With a winning combination of great products and responsive and enlightened customer relationships, it’s easy to see why they are a leading manufacturer of fiber cement products in North America.

Part of building products producer Elementia, the Houston-based enterprise focuses on the exterior siding needs of small-to-medium contractors and custom builders, deftly tailoring their business to the often underappreciated niche with impressive results. Whether it’s siding, panels, shakes or shingles, soffit, or backer board that’s needed, Allura products add beauty and curb appeal to every style.

Whether traditional, contemporary, or in between, their products deliver the aesthetic appeal of wood without termites, fungal decay, or combustion risk, are paintable, and are engineered to resist weather wear. Their fiber cement siding products are NGBS Green Certified, and are suitable for LEED® projects. Their products are made in North Carolina, Oregon, and Laredo, Texas.

Behind the sweeping product selection with a texture and style for every taste is a fierce dedication to customer experience. “We started as an alternative provider in the fiber cement space, but we've grown into much more than that. We’re building long-term partnerships and relationships with our core customers and the communities that we work with,” explained company VP of sales and marketing Kevin Potthoff.

“Our purpose in life is to make a material difference in our customers’ processes in their day-to-day business, not just offer a product catalog and say pick A, B, or C. We work to get to know them better, to learn what their needs are, predict what their needs are going to be a year or five years from now, and adjust our business to meet the needs in that core group of small-to-medium builders.” Allura’s revenues have grown four-fold since their debut.

Moving volume for volume’s sake, said Potthoff, is the province of other companies. “We don’t produce strictly for volume,” he said. “It’s not a slight when people say we don't have the other market share of the larger players in the market. Our size means we can be more nimble and agile, and focus on what the customer really wants and provide that day-in and day-out. ... We don’t force square pegs into round holes. We build solutions to give the best customer experience possible. That's why people want to do business with us, why we've had the success we’ve had.”

As disruptors in the space, Allura embraces technology to make material differences in their CX. Prior to the pandemic, they looked at the tech in their digital platform with an eye toward doing business in a best-fit way for their customers. A refreshed website, and platform development with Salesforce and SAP helped to improve their supply chain, enabled faster ordering and easier access to product information, and an experience that suits the vast range of SMBs.

“From there, we took it to the sales level and developed training and safety videos,” he added. “Even before the new age of Zoom meetings we were already developing training platforms so our dealers could teach their customers’ customers about our products. The new platforms have increased our website traffic by 70,000 visitors a month. The site’s chatbots have really increased traffic for our product videos, and it’s been overwhelmingly successful.”

Treating their customers’ time as precious also sets them apart. “Smaller builders don't have time to sit around the office and chase information, going to various websites to find what they need when they need it. We’ve added mobile-ready QR codes to our pallet bags that allow them to get installation instructions or information in real time on the job site through their mobile device.”

Much of the raw materials used in Allura’s product lines are locally sourced. “We build relationships with the communities we serve, understanding how we affect the community and how we can better communicate whether it’s through employment or providing better workplaces. We take that approach across all of our vendors.

“We have some great vendors who’ve been with us a long time, and while it may sound cliche, we're not going to be a great company without them. We add value to their businesses as well. Many businesses are all about the price point, getting the lowest they can get. We believe that’s the wrong approach. The right approach is to build upon those relationships and have open communication so we can find what's best for both of us in the long-term, and those are the vendors we look for.”

Through Elementia, Allura USA partners with cement producer Giant, whose CEO Tim Kuebler also helms Allura. The collected knowledge and expertise is an added benefit to customers and to the company. “We have people that have been in fiber cement for 25-plus years, as well as those on the Giant side that have been there for a long time. They're just genuinely great people with a lot of experience and diversity, and allowing those two groups to come together to build a better organization will benefit us for years to come.”

A personal guiding principle lights their path. “From the person that comes in in the morning and turns on the lights, all the way to the CEO, we all try to make a material difference for our internal and external customers,” he stressed. “At the end of every day, we each try to look back to one thing we’ve done that day that is going to make us easier to do business with. That’s what we’re about: doing the one thing today that's going to make a difference in all of our stakeholders internally and externally—and we just happen to be making interior and exterior products.” Allura USA knows that life is so much better when it’s beautiful on the inside and out, and that will keep them growing for many years to come.