Paragon Steel Launches New Web Site

By Jim Stavis

     With great fanfare, Paragon Steel is proud to launch our new Web site for 2006. We have given the Web site, located at www.paragonsteel. com, a whole new look, with updated products, services and project information. We will be updating the newsletter and project sections on a monthly basis to keep the site fresh and informative. The site will be launched officially the middle of March and features a new company mascot, sumo wrestlers. We will get to them later in this newsletter.
      As a measure of thanks for sending us an inquiry and filling out our credit application off the Web site, we will send you a nice gift. We are always looking for feedback, so if you have any comments regarding the new site, we welcome your input.

Why Sumo Wrestlers?

You will find in our new site the use of sumo wrestlers – one that stands for quality and one for service

that are squaring off against one another. The tag line is “Why can’t quality and service get along?” We thought the sumo wrestler would be an innovative way to prove our point that they can and do at Paragon Steel.      Sumo is a form of wrestling that goes back to the earliest historical records in Japanese history. In the early periods it was used as a method of resolving political disputes with the might of two wrestlers squaring off against one another. In later periods, sumo wrestling emerged as a sport with rules and ceremonies that hold true today. Into today’s modern times, sumo has become a professional sport which is extremely popular like baseball or football is in this country.
      Sumo wrestlers, weighing up to 580 pounds each, are set in a ring that is only 15 feet in diameter and the winner is the wrestler who can stay in the ring the longest without falling down. Given the simplicity of defeat and the small size of the wrestling ring, it is no surprise that the matches are quite short. A long match is only 1 or 2 minutes long and the average duration is under 30 seconds. The sport has benefited greatly from slow motion television which can repeat the furious action slow enough for viewers to comprehend the results.      There are four levels or grades of competition. The Grand Champions are the most highly skilled who compete in 15 bouts a year. Then there are the Junior Champions, Champions and Champions Second Class that fight seven bouts a year.      What is so intriguing about the sumo wrestlers is first of all their immense size, but also their attire (or lack of) which is a thick belt which can be grasped by their opponent and used to lever the wearer out of the ring. As of now we have not named our sumo wrestlers (other than Quality and Service). We hope you can appreciate our new theme to kick off our Web presence.

The Internet and Steel

By Jim Stavis

     Back in 1990 we wrote about the Internet
and its impact on the steel industry. Back
then it was more like the Inter-Not, than the
Internet, as buyers were reluctant to embrace
the new technology to serve their steel
needs. As the Internet has revolutionized
the purchasing of travel, music, books—
and through eBay just about everything—it
has slowly evolved as a mechanism to buy
commodities, particularly steel.
     Back in 1990, there were sites such as
MetalSite, e-Steel and a host of others that
were building IPOs to deliver steel cheaper
and more efficiently than traditional
distribution channels. The problem was
that the glut of new companies forgot one
thing—how to actually turn a profit.
     When the tech bubble finally burst, most
of the Internet-based companies disappeared
from the landscape. But not all of them.

I spoke with Scott Shapiro of Steel Salvor,
an auction-based Web site that specializes
in mill surplus and insurance-claimed
materials. Scott’s business has doubled in
the past year with sales of 50,000 tons last
year and reports having posted his best
month ever just last month. Scott claims
they are not in the auction business, but
are in the marketing business. They list
their products to 6,300 companies across
the country and try to match buyers
with sellers (similar to eBay). Their
ultimate goal is to change the way steel is
distributed, using the Internet as the tool
to make it happen.
     In my opinion, Steel Salvor is more a
company that appeals to steel distributors
than to end users. An end user might be
more reluctant to take a chance on a surplus
or secondary lot of steel with the fear that
it might be misrepresented or not suitable
for their operation. A distributor, on the
other hand, might have other customers
that the steel might be more suitable for.
So will end users ever embrace the Internet
as a place to buy their steel? That is a tough
question to answer.
     Many distributors have set up Ecommerce
pages on their sites with the
intent of takings orders. We have found
that customers still need a customer
service component to be sure that they
are getting exactly what they want,
in the form and quantity that suits
them best. The Internet can be a great
tool for acquiring information or for
communicating, but there will always
be the need for some level of customer
service. We at Paragon Steel hope this is
always the case.