While people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks, rare stones are helping Westmoreland County’s Excel Glass and Granite shatter sales goals. Established as a family-owned glass business more than 60 years ago, Excel built a regional business for commercial and residential glass.
In 2003, William Pecora bought the company and moved it into the market for custom-finished stone. Since then, Excel Glass and Granite has doubled sales and is expanding employment with the opening of a new custom-stone fabrication plant at the Jeanette Industrial Park.
With the new facility, Pecora says Excel is targeting another doubling of sales in the next two years. That anticipated growth would increase employment at the granite plant by 150 percent (from the current 8 positions to 20) by the end of 2009. Another 14 employees work in Excel’s glass division.
Importing rare marble from quarries in Italy, Brazil, India, and Canada, along with marble from the United States, the fabrication plant also provides clients with a wide variety of granite, limestone, and soapstone. Evolving from its long-established base of customers for finished glass, Excel has become a full-service provider of both hard-to-handle materials in businesses and homes throughout its seven-county market in southwestern Pennsylvania.
“We’ve seen our reputation grow from the customers who know us the longest in glass,” Pecora says. “That awareness has translated to expansion into stone products.”
The new plant also represents an investment in technology, automated equipment that handles sawing, drilling, edging, and polishing of stone, as well as a water recycling system to capture, clean, and reuse the large volumes of water used in stone fabrication.
The tradition of glass-making is more than a century old in Jeanette, which was known as the Glass City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was named for the wife of a town founder and builder of its first glass plant. Knowledgeable employees, who have a strong rapport with customers, enable Excel to carry on that tradition, and the town works hard to encourage the growth of business there now, says Pecora.
That’s why, for the expansion, he selected the industrial park, which is located on the site of a former glass manufacturing plant. “I found the town more than willing to make things work and streamline the process so that we could grow our business,” he says.
Source: Excel Glass and Granite, William Pecora
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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