Through tours of duty with first movers in unit masonry landscape products, principals of recently incorporated Interlock Concrete Pavers saw business boom from market to market. As retail distribution of pavers and segmental retaining wall units helped catapult the business from 1980s novelty to 1990s mainstream, however, they also observed a pitfall involving key customers.

“Contractors — the guys who helped sell jobs and make a name for the product in the beginning — got left behind as many producers focused efforts on other market segments,” contends Greg Shepherd, president of Katy, Texas-based Interlock Concrete. “This company is all about serving design professionals and contractors. Our promotional work is aimed at creating new projects, not just providing product for existing jobs.”

“We have four salesmen calling on architects and engineers,” adds Operations Manager Bruce Ledbetter, Shepherd's colleague from a former employer. “They promote the color and texture possibilities landscape contractors and architects achieve with pavers, and show how interlocking pavements can fit into more engineered applications.

“Riding the wave of commercial product popularity gave some producers reason to minimize their promotion of segmental units to architects and engineers. This created a hole in some production backlogs.”

Both Shepherd and Ledbetter also point to a shift in the specified market for concrete landscape products, noting that the U.S. industry appears to be progressing in a manner opposite that of Europe, where unit masonry for pavements, earth retaining and erosion control originated. “In Europe, the industry evolved from municipal pavement and other engineered applications,” Shepherd explains. “Here, market acceptance has been driven by aesthetic value. We have built production to serve the architectural or aesthetic part of the market, but see additional opportunity in promoting pavers for heavy-duty applications.”

Home on the ranch

Under Shepherd's direction, and with an outside investor's backing, Interlock Concrete Pavers set up shop on a 100-plus acre site west of Houston in fall 2000. Eyeing special colors and multi-colored blends, the company started with one traveling machine and a single mixer batch plant; after about 10 months and 3 million square feet of paving stone production, a second machine and mixer were installed to ramp up for year number two.

“We were able to build a few extras into an office and plant for a staff of 20, and create an environment where each person knows what is expected of him or her,” says Ledbetter. The plant, for example, has a large, air conditioned break room; in the office building, individual offices are of modest size, allowing more square footage to be devoted to upscale conference, product display and lunch rooms.

During its first year, Interlock Concrete built a product line of 12 solid colors and 12 blended colors in 16 shaped paver profiles. With salesmen covering Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, the company landed commercial jobs, along with some high-end residential orders, throughout the Lone Star State. Additional business was logged on orders in Louisiana and Oklahoma.

Interlock Concrete expanded its premium offering with two proprietary units: a diamond-shaped paver modeled after the Rhomba Stone from German producer Ehl; and the Risi Wall unit from Ontario's Risi Stone Systems. Standard and premium products are supported with Sweet's Catalog-type literature.

Most product is now available in “tumbled” finish, thanks to tumbling equipment installed last year. Amid the addition of that equipment, along with product and mixing machinery and new licensed units, Interlock Concrete secured a 10-acre site for a second plant to serve the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. The company is also scouting property for a central Texas plant.

Interlock Concrete landed along a stretch of Texas Highway 529 in Katy. The location positions the company to serve nearby Houston, plus Austin, San Antonio and much of southeastern and south central Texas. The office exterior and interior showcase paving stone offerings; the building itself is of tumbled concrete brick construction, topped by a conventional frame roof with MonierLifetile concrete tiles. Surrounding the plant and office is grazing land for a small herd of cattle.

The CS/2 Consolidating Station has powered rollers that will index cubes and provide vertical or horizontal strapping.

For material storage and handling, Standley Batch Systems supplied an 300-ton aggregate bin with four compartments. A conventional weigh belt and skip hoist charge each Rapid 1500 mixer. For coloring, Interlock Concrete opted to use the Davis' Granumat metering system and Granufin iron oxide pigments.

Almost a year after plant commissioning, the company added a second Zenith 940 Super Traveler machine. Each machine can deliver as many as five colors in a cube, imparting a variegation difficult to match with conventional board equipment. Fully automated, the 940 also enables the operator to oversee quality control by viewing each paver layer and, when necessary, replacing unacceptable stones in advance of the machine's next pass. Zenith officials note that, in addition to color and quality control matters, the machines are capable of providing consistently intense vibration cycles needed to produce paving units suited to heavy industrial application.

The machines are served by Zenith's bridge crane-mounted Concrete Bucket Overhead Delivery System. With a 1,500-liter (about 2 yd.) capacity, the bucket can rapidly transfer material from the twin mixers. An encoder-equipped path-measuring system included in the controls package ensures that the bucket can automatically pinpoint the 940 machines' feed hoppers.