Foshan Monica Quartz Stone Co., Ltd. was founded in 2008 in the Feng’en Industrial Zone, Leping Town, Sanshui District of Foshan, Guangdong, China. The company, which is owned by Jinpan Chen & Xueyuan Chen, sells its products to North America through its affiliated brand of PolarStone U.S., and has supplied its material for several high-profile retail and hospitality projects in the U.S. Additionally, it provides OEM for select distributors — both nationally and internationally.
“The predecessor of Monica Quartz was a ceramic equipment company in Foshan, Guangdong, China, which was founded in 1993,” explained Mark Schama of PolarStone U.S. “It focused on designing and producing ceramic equipment for updating the color and texture in porcelain tiles body. It launched its quartz product business in 2008, and began to promote and use the brand Monica Quartz then.
“After seven years of development, Monica Quartz has grown up to a modern quartz surface company, with an area of 40,000 square meters and more than 160 well-trained employees -- supplying faultless service from design, production, fabricating, packaging and logistics to after-sales to our customers,” Schama went on to say. “Monica Quartz specially focuses on developing real marble and other natural stone designs like Carrara, Statuario, Calacatta and Soapstone.”
Of its products sold, 90% is 2- and 3-cm slabs, while the other 10% is cut-to-size work. “Slabs are sold to natural stone distributors and relative quartz distributors, and commercial installation companies for cut-to-size,” said Schama. “Our PolarStone brand customers include Dente Trading, AGM Imports, IGM Corp, Unique Stone Concepts and Cronin.”
The company’s factory in China is approximately 40,000 square meters. “We exclusively use Chencor Machinery -- designed and built by the factory owner, mechanical and hydraulic engineer, Jinpan Chen,” said Schama. “We run two new lines, which are capable of producing the ‘vein through’ marble design quartz. We are refurbishing an older Chencor line and building a fourth line, which will be ready for production in October 2015.
Schama explained that Chen has more than 25 years’ experience in building German-engineered machinery for the porcelain industry. He purchased Foshan Monica Quartz Stone Co. with the idea of producing authentic-looking marble and stone design quartz slabs.
After successfully launching the first series of marble colors through PolarStone, the Chencor machines are now being used to produce Calacatta Vagli quartz, which allows the use of Calacatta marble in applications not previously recommended for soft marble, such as kitchen countertops, according to Schama.
As for employees, every worker on staff goes through training on production safety and health protection. When searching for new employees, the company often hires family and friends of those on staff and also hires through people who apply on the internet.
Currently, Foshan Monica Quartz Stone Co. has a capacity to produce 110 containers monthly. “We will increase to 200 containers per month by 2016,” said Schama, adding that when looking to the future, the company will “continue to focus on perfecting natural stone design slabs using our unique machinery built for this purpose.”
