5 minute read
Due South
LUXkbs cabinet door maker growing at home with an eye to the US
By James Risdon, Wood Industry Contributing Writer
Paris Malenfant President & CEO at LUXkbs & Wesllay Hache Production Manufacturing Manager at Luxkbs
Fledgling laminate cabinet door maker LUXkbs is already in the black and looking to expand its Moncton operations after busting through its sales projections for the year in less than half that time, says the company’s top exec. “In the last five months, we’ve exceeded our annual projection for sales,” explains LUXkbs president and CEO Paris Malenfant.
The company, founded in 2021, only started selling its products in May this year, hoping to hit $360,000 in sales during its first year of operations, after getting its 7,840-square-foot shop on Halifax Street in New Brunswick’s hub city set up. But by the third week of October, LUXkbs already had roughly $380,000 in sales – and Malenfant is now eyeing ment team. “I’ll hire 20 employees next year,” says Malenfant. “Atlantic Canada is in a growth stage.” Certainly, Atlantic Canada’s biggest city, Halifax, is booming. It saw an unprecedented spike in new housing starts in 2021, with an annual growth rate of 16.8 per cent and 3,794 housing units built, most of them apartments, according to the Halifax Partnership’s Halifax Index 2022.
This year, housing construction in Halifax is still going strong. In only two days in June, Nova Scotia’s housing minister, John Lohr, approved two developments that alone will mean more than 1,000 new homes in the Halifax Regional Municipality. The old Penhorn Mall property in Dartmouth is being built out with 860 apartments and 45 townhouses, along with commercial space on the ground floor of several apartment buildings.
The other development is an affordable housing project, also in Dartmouth, that will see the construction of 373 apartments. “They are building,” adds Malenfant, “and they need our doors which are generally less expensive than wood doors.” LUXkbs is gaining access to that booming Halifax market through a distribution deal with the Halifax outlet of Würth McFadden’s.
That distributor of melamine, quality knobs, pulls, cabinets, kitchen and closet solutions also has five other outlets located in Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes and Newfoundland and Labrador and could potentially open the door to other Canadian markets for LUXkbs. In New Brunswick, LUXkbs has been serving the regional market by building relationships directly with cabinet makers. When Malenfant and her husband – and production and manufacturing
explosive growth in the coming year. “For next year, we’re looking at $1.2 million in sales,” she says. The entrepreneur is in talks to buy the building in which the business is located.
And the company is in hiring mode, planning to roughly triple its workforce, which now consists of nine people including the owners and rest of the manage-
manager – Wesllay Hache, founded LUXkbs – an acronym which stands for “Luxury kitchen bathroom and storage”– last year, they invested an undisclosed amount described only as being under $500,000. They secured a low-interest loan from the Business Development Bank of Canada for $120,000 to get started. The seed of the idea that would become LUXkbs had taken root prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The husbandand-wife team of 40-somethings were already entrepreneurs in a steel roofing company in Moncton when Malenfant decided to sell her shares and use that capital to start a new business. “We were going to start a small, home-based business in our garage… and then we were told this would be much bigger than something like that,” she explains. Not everybody was on board. An advisory group went so far as to tell the serial entrepreneurs to not bother starting the business at all because the market was supposedly already facing a glut of cabinet makers. Unwilling to just throw in the towel, Malenfant did her own market research and discovered roughly half the cabinet makers in Atlantic Canada were buying laminate doors and were eager to be able to order them from a local producer. The couple took the plunge.
After checking to ensure they could get a steady supply of the materials they would need to make their doors from engineered wood products manufacturers Uniboard Canada and Arauco, they leased out a building in an industrial sector in Moncton. Renovating and upgrading the building’s electrical system took a big bite out of the start-up’s capital but the entrepreneurs saved by having their own LUXkbs-branded equipment made to their specifications by machine manufacturers. They also built some of the equipment themselves, including the spray booth.
TOP: Melissa Langille, Director of Operations BOTTOM: Timothy Kearney
“Wes made this with flat sheet metal,” explains Malenfant. “It cost us $500 to make and would have cost $15,000 or more to buy.” Using Mozaik Software to cut the doors out of the sheets of material on the CNC machine, workers at
LEFT: Lamination rolls BOTTOM RIGHT: Wesllay Hache
LUXkbs then sand the surfaces and apply a water-based, non-toxic Kleiberit glue ahead of drying the core of the door, and then laminating it. Malenfant wants to expand the physical space available to the company to include an additional storage area for raw materials and finished products. She sees the company’s competitive edge as being able to precisely match on LUXkbs doors the patterns and colours of customers’ cabinets and to then deliver those doors to cabinet makers more quickly than bigger players outside the region – within a couple of weeks instead of months. Malenfant is already eyeing the American market. Using Moncton’s strategic location as a transportation hub for the Maritimes, she hopes to expand south of the border. “Moncton is very close to the United States, to Maine and Bangor, and that’s one of the reasons we’re here,” she says. “Our plan is to start expanding into the United States in less than two years.”
