Ferguson: to follow up on Terry's thoughts, I feel the whole category of waterjet work has been changed like that. I was trying to think of analogies. There are a couple of Minnesota companies here, one's Rollerblade and one's NordicTrack. They both made the jump from highly specialized products for cross-country skiers in the summer and they jumped over into general fitness and it just exploded.

I think the same thing is happening here. Even if the consumers don't understand the roots of waterjet or even the technology behind it, they are starting to see the end result and there's a much broader market now.

I'm thinking of a couple of projects. One of them has been kind of fun. Here, locally, is the artist formerly known as prince, who, unencumbered by restraint, took his symbol and made it 10' feet high with the appropriate purple stones and put it into the floor of paisley park which is his recording studio. So that's a project we've just completed in the last couple of months.

Another project is representative of the kind of work we do at Pietra Bella. A big segment of our business is selling products through distributors. That way, we are able to leverage our artistic abilities to a much broader audience. We've just finished a project where we've put a couple of large borders into an entryway. What's interesting is that first we do the original work and then the clients are so excited when they see it that they keep adding on to it.

Roundtable Conference: Waterjet Technology - Continued

Continued from

But a lot of our customers in Italy are being split between the artisans and the producers, and we're finding that more of our machines lately are going into ceramic production applications where they have four cutting heads, multiple machines and they're just running, basically, three-shift operations producing borders, standard products, catalog-type medallions, and things that are, for all intents and purposes, mass production. : the other side of that are those people who are staying with the more artistic, value-added concept of doing individual works or catalog work that is of higher value or higher material quality with a lot more stone.

So these guys basically formed another company in addition to the one that's doing the ceramics, acquired more machines and now are doing the artistic marble type of work. I thought that was interesting to see just how things are splitting up into how this product has really, in some ways, become so accepted. Whether it's recognized or not is the other question we talked about concerning the waterjet-but the machine's end result is a recognized product now. In some ways it's becoming a production! Product, and I think it will be interesting to see how that shakes out with the artist side of the business: how they maintain the value-added aspect against this production mentality. It's going to be interesting to see in the next couple of years how that all comes down.

Campbell: Definitely. Tom, you're up.