What we do: A walk through our wheelhouse

Posted by Seth Braverman on

What we do: A walk through our wheelhouse

 

From your first phone call to the FedEx pick-up, everything we do happens in our Fort Collins facility.

Xylem Design (the parent company of Pedestal Source) does two things, and having worked hard at them for 30 years, we can confidently say we do those two things very well.

We design and we build.

Specializing in displays and custom components for branded environments—including exhibits, events and retail spaces—we take your ideas and make them into real things. Really good looking things.

Design

Our in-house design team can take your concept or vision, vague as it may be, and translate it into a branded environment, retail fixture, piece of furniture or display.

Some of our customers will call us with a solid idea of what they’re looking for, including sketches and dimensions. Others know they have a product to show off and a deadline and that’s about it. We work with both types of customers and everyone in between.

As exhibit and display builders, we’re very visual. We invite our customers into the process using our Gemba Cam—a live video feed into our workspace—where together we review the material, size, shape and lighting until we land on a design that we both understand and love.

Value engineering is one of our specialties—which is to say, we know how to design around your budget to meet your needs, so you’ll never be surprised by the bottom line.

Safety and precision are cornerstones of our fabrication stations.

Build

If you visit our shop—which we hope you do (for real)—you might notice we don’t have any storage. That’s because we have nothing to store. All of our products are built to order, meeting the specific needs of our diverse clientele.

We do bulk and one-offs. We work with acrylics, laminates, real wood veneers, and basically anything that begins its life as a 4’x8’ sheet. We can use any skin, any substrate, anything you can dream up (well, almost anything).

We built sixty white pedestals for Maison 10. If you’ve been there, you probably haven’t noticed them—precisely our goal—as they were designed to showcase their wares, not ours. As pedestal and display builders, that’s just part of the deal.

On the other end of the spectrum is the acrylic light box we built for Smart Wool (designed by this rad team of creatives). At 10’ tall, it took one hundred 3” x 3” colored acrylic squares of varying thicknesses to form a giant rendition of their Little Guy logo, complete with beating heart. There was no missing their trade show booth, and that was the point.

We look to Toyota as our sensei when it comes to production: We aim to deliver the highest quality at the lowest cost with the best delivery.

This means we have our systems dialed in, allowing us to turn around projects incredibly quickly— sometimes even same day. Building for events and trade shows, our customers need to trust that when we say we can meet a deadline, we will—come hell or high water. Think that’s an exaggeration? Just ask us about the pallet of custom white pedestals: destroyed in transit when the 18-wheeler caught fire, rebuilt that afternoon, and overnighted in time for the event. It’s a fun story, but we really champion systems over heroes.

Tools of a lean business. Staying organized and clean is a priority at PedestalSource.

Call us old fashioned, but we love face-to-face time. Our customers are all over the map, and it’s our goal to make them feel like we’re just down the street. Being Colorado folk, that’s just how we do. You’re always welcome to visit but even if you can’t, we’ll hop on the Gemba Cam, send you a video of your project in process, and let you know via Facetime/Skype/your-technology-of-choice exactly what you’re getting before it ships. Everything is built-to-order, so we make sure we get it right the first time, every time.

Diehard believers in continuous improvement, both individually and as a company, you’ll find we never get comfortable with where we’re at. Every time we enter into the design + build process, expect it to be better than the last. As our skills and processes continually improve, so does your experience.

Contact us to start your next project. We can’t wait. 

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