For nearly 13 years, Tucson-based Structural Elastomeric Products Inc. has been manufacturing its own line of acrylic roof coatings, which are able to reflect up to 92 percent of the sun's ultraviolet rays.
The company, better known as Elastek, made its name on high-end, higher priced coatings.
But this spring Elastek released the latest in its product line-up — The Shield — a mid-level-quality coating that puts it in direct competition with the mass-market labels and store brands of its competitors.
The Shield "was designed to fill a market of lower-end mass-market coatings. What we ended up with was a product that was as good as most of the mid-level-priced products out there," said Jerry Rockwell, a lab technician at Elastek.
At $57.99 for five gallons, The Shield is lower priced than its sister products, but Elastek is pricing the coating slightly higher than its mid-priced competitors and counting on consumers to perceive it as high quality.
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The federally supported Energy Star program lists 175 roof coating manufacturers in the United States, at least nine of which are in Arizona, including Elastek. That figure doesn't take into account the additional hundreds of coatings not certified by Energy Star.
From its 18,000-square foot manufacturing facility at 3700 S. Palo Verde Road, Elastek's 17 employees produce up to 5,000 gallons of roof coating per day in spring, the peak season.
With a distribution network that stretches throughout Arizona, New Mexico, California and Louisiana, Elastek has performed well with its premium line of roof coatings such as the $95.99 Solar Tek Extreme. Annual sales are in the range of $5 million, said CEO Rick Ulrich.
Many of The Shield's competitors are produced by larger companies and big-box home improvement stores, said Janice Ulrich, chief financial officer of the company and spouse of Rick Ulrich.
Elastek's theory goes like this: in a highly competitive market, some businesses sell what they believe are higher quality products at a higher price with the assumption that customers will make the connection between the two.
In other words, the strategy follows the logic of "you get what you pay for" and is why some luxury brands can charge what may seem an exorbitant price for their products.
The roof coating industry is one such competitive market, said Saeed Mahmoodi, owner and president of the three-year-old Tucson Rubberized Coatings, at 6351 S. Tucson Blvd. It also operates a second retail location at 5355 E. 29th St.
"It's competitive anywhere you go," he said. "In capitalism, that's the only way to go."
While Elastek is quick to tout its quality, Mahmoodi argued that the quality among brands is about the same.
The difference in which companies succeed or fail in their efforts to remain competitive, he said, is determined by the effectiveness of their manufacturing processes and ability to control overhead.
But Elastek views customer service as another significant part of the business.
To compete against the larger companies, Rick Ulrich said, "you look for things that they don't do well. In our case, we think that the customer service and product quality were issues."
"Everybody goes into the big-box stores for something, but roof coatings need a bit more help to explain," Janice Ulrich said.
Taking cues from other companies such as the top-selling Stihl brand of saws, which proudly declares in ads its connection to independent retailers, Elastek has elected to continue selling its coatings through dealers such as Ace Hardware and Sherwin-Williams stores.
At the Ace Hardware at 2185 E. Irvington Road, about half a dozen buckets of Elastek's Solar Tek were neatly arranged in a display at the store's entrance, and assistant manager Larry McCasters explained that it's not often he stocks any other brand.
"If the customer wants something other than Elastek, we can order it," he said. Generally, most customers are looking for the same thing: "They want something that will last long at a good price."