I am in an interesting position. I have a fabrication business that does retail. We had four showrooms and now have three (see Andy's quitter thread). We also do wholesale manufacturing for other companies. On top of that, we have a wholesale slab distribution business.

If you are getting in to the game now, no matter which market you want to service, you either better be very small or very big. To do what we do requires a large investment. We are a fairly large volume shop (8-10 kitchens a day) and import 10-12 containers a month. We stock about 1000 slabs.

But we had to grow into this. There's no way I would jump into this business blind at this point in time. The return would not justify the investment. But we had already made most of the investment, so the decision was kind of made for us.

If you are looking to get into the wholesale slab business I would focus on hitting those real high end designers and try driving them in house. If you are looking for that high end only group then you will have to have super rare material, All of my largest residential sales have been super rare materials, one of a kind.