RSS FeedWood Stone received the “You Had me at Hello” Award from Swanson-Girard & Associates (SGA) in August. The award is a tradition of formally recognizing outstanding customer service by awarding one customer service department that has set a higher standard for professional support through knowledge, expedience and congeniality.
Although this was a departmental award, SGA singled out both Jackie VanZwol and Jana Logan for their outstanding performance. Great job!
Angela Barnes, Wood Stone’s AR & Credit Manager, has been nominated by the National Food Equipment Manufacturer’s Credit Exchange for this year’s Above and Beyond Award. Nominees are considered for going “above and beyond” the call of duty to mentor, motivate and otherwise work on behalf of the group.
The presentation of this award will take place during the Credit Professional Recognition Luncheon at the Credit Professionals Conference on September 17, 2009. The event takes place at the Marriott on the Plaza in Kansas City, MO. Congratulations on your nomination Angela!
This year’s Wood Stone employee company picnic was held at Birch Bay State Park. Wood Stoner’s could easily be identified by their yellow shirts that sported admission tickets to a carnival themed event - complete with great food, carnival themed games and activities. The highlight of the day was the dunk tank! Company presidents, Keith Carpenter and Harry Hegarty took turns being submerged in gallons of water. Fellow co-worker, Tim Tracy, even took a turn in the tank. Thank you to everyone who contributed and participated this year – it was fun! Check out photos submitted by Wood Stone employees from the event.
Wood Stone is proud to announce the launch of a new generation of website. We decided to redesign for several reasons. The first was to better reflect what Wood Stone is about – great people, great food and quality, highly-engineered products. Another reason was to make the site more user friendly by adjusting the navigation to create a better experience for those visiting us – our site has grown over the years and needed a new map. In all, this new site has been in development for about a year. We hope you’ll find it easy to use, informative and an improvement on our last version.
By the way, this will be our 4th version of the website since we created our first in 1996. That version was developed way back when 14.4K was a typical connection speed and many people thought e-mail was a typo. In fact when we built our first website there was even some trepidation about exposing our young computer system to the newfangled “world wide web”. Perhaps by design, perhaps by coincidence, perhaps just to have a little fun with him – we may never know for sure – we relegated our intern who took on the job of building the first website (by hand in notepad) to set up shop in our modest conference room in our old home in Sumas, WA. “That Computer” was away from all the other computers…It was noted, more than once and with only a hint of irony, that this was the only computer in that room. So not only did we want the web to go only to that computer, apparently we didn’t even want that computer in the same room with the other computers for fear of what might break out – or so the office legend goes. Well, we’ve come a long way since then.
Where our first site had roughly 12 pages with a snappy aircraft carrier grey background and roughly 20 pictures, our new site has close to 800 individual pages, hundreds of spec sheets and manuals, and over a thousand images. Over 10,000 visitors visit the site each month. We’ve created dynamic video content for cooking education, history, service and more topics to come. We have built one of the most comprehensive installation sections in the industry. The Photo Gallery grows every day. Our Recipes Library is a treasure trove of culinary ideas. Our Consultants’ Corner is an easy one-stop shop for all the information a designer will need, from façade tutorials to CAD symbols. Our new product selection tool is a great conversation starter for any one considering stone hearth cooking equipment (look for it on our home page and in the products section). Our website integrates a new blog, connects up to Facebook and YouTube, and hopefully answers all your questions.
We hope you enjoy our new site; we’ve certainly enjoyed developing it. And with all kidding aside, we aim for it to be the most comprehensive, content-heavy, informative, easy to navigate and use website in the industry. We want to open up the world of stone hearth and theater cooking to any who wants to know more. We strive for nothing less. Happy browsing!
