Some companies have their work cut out for them when it comes to getting people excited about their products. Everybody appreciates a gutter that works, for instance, but most of us don’t think about how much we appreciate it (unless we’re up on a ladder in the rain, unclogging one that doesn’t work).

What’s a gutter company to do, then? If you have a high-quality, useful product, naturally you want people to notice it, especially in the store. Well, one approach is to create a compelling, eye-catching display that makes people want to look more closely at your product.

That’s the approach our clients at EXCEPTIONAL Metals went with. They recently hired us to design and build five identical displays to show off their roofing products. The results were so unique that we decided to highlight them in our latest Transformation Story.

And since, as usual, our clients talked about more than the video could include, here’s the full transcript of our conversation with team leader Nicole Sanford. Read on for more details about what the displays include and how they’ll help EXCEPTIONAL Metals’ plans for growth.

Can you introduce yourself and explain what you do at EXCEPTIONAL Metals?

Sure! My name’s Nicole Sanford. I am the EXCEPTIONAL Metals team leader. Basically, I run the daily activities of our estimating/engineering team, work with marketing, and make sure things are going well.

So what are some of EXCEPTIONAL Metals’ products?

Oh, we manufacture metal roofing. We also do edge details — primarily edge details right now, we’re at probably a 60-40 split on that.  So we do gutters, downspouts, termination details, all kinds of stuff.  We also do a lot of customization for contractors.

What were you guys’ reasons for ordering some custom displays for EXCEPTIONAL Metals?

Currently we’re in the process of trying to get the EXCEPTIONAL Metals name out there, expand our business a lot, and we don’t have any displays. We wanted to be a spearhead for the company and [be able to say] “Hey, this is what we’ve got. We want to show you what we have rather than just looking at brochures.”

We work with a lot of distributors, not just contractors, so we made [the displays] so we can put our actual products and samples right in-house in the distributor displays. I mean, obviously you don’t want to look at a brochure when you can see a true sample.

Can you describe what exactly is in the display?

The display truly puts a sample of so many of our products out there. We have our drainage, we have our edge details, we have color samples of our metals so you actually see the true color rather than [a picture] on a paper, where you clearly can’t compare. It really gives you a true perspective of what you’re going to get.

What feedback have you gotten since the displays were installed?

We haven’t actually gotten them shipped out to our distributors yet. We do have a display right now in-house, and being that our company is the size that it is there’s a lot of different departments and whatnot. From everybody looking at it we’ve gotten all positive [reviews]. They really like it and are thinking about maybe even doing [one] themselves.

And lastly, what was the process of working with ZENTX like?

ZENTX was great to work with. You guys are just phenomenal as far as following up and keeping those lines of communication open. If we had questions [or] we needed to get out there [to ZENTX’s facility], that was very, very easy to work with. I would definitely do it again.

Check out our interview with Mike Gwizdala to hear what another EXCEPTIONAL Metals leader had to say about this project.