WHEN ARMEN ALAJIAN stepped into the leadership of his father’s Los Angeles tile business, the product already carried weight. Decades of work across luxury residential, hospitality, and commercial projects had earned ARTO a market position that isn’t easily replicated. That foundation was never in question. What Armen had to build was everything around it.

Today, ARTO supplies more than 300 dealer locations across the United States, with work appearing on some of the most demanding luxury and commercial projects in the country. The growth didn’t come from changing what goes into the product. It came from three business decisions made around it. How to invest when competitors go quiet. How to scale without losing structural integrity, and how to make a brand the market cannot afford to overlook.

Spending Into the Silence

At the time, ARTO had roughly 25 dealer relationships. Strong product. Loyal following. Limited reach. The ceiling wasn’t quality. It was distribution, and it wasn’t meeting its potential.

Then the Great Recession hit, and something counterintuitive happened. As competitors pulled back, cut budgets, and went quiet across the industry, ARTO leaned in. From roughly 2010 through 2016, the company committed to attending every major trade show it could get to. Coverings, Surfaces, HC Expo for hospitality. Every show that put them in front of potential dealers, they were there.

The economic logic behind that decision isn’t complicated in hindsight, even if it was difficult to see from inside a recession. Ad costs dropped when demand for them dried up. Reach got more affordable as the competitive field thinned out. The same marketing dollar bought significantly more presence than it would have in a healthy economy. “The dollar went further,” Armen says. “The ads were less expensive. The reach was more affordable because there were fewer people out there.”

The results were not gradual. ARTO went from 25 dealers to 300, and revenue doubled in 2012.

What makes this transferable isn’t the tactic, it’s the honesty with which Armen tells it. He doesn’t frame it as strategic foresight. “It was only looking backward that we realized how smart it was,” he says. “We did it because we had to.” They were foxes, in his framing, just trying to get through the Fridays and pay the bills. A contractor facing a contracting market today and wondering whether to hold or go will recognize that position immediately. The cost of showing up when the room is empty is lower than it looks. The return, compounded over time, is difficult to overstate.

ARTO’s product was just as strong in 2010 as it had been in 1966. The growth had nothing to do with what was being made in the facility. It had everything to do with the decision to show up when no one else would.

Growing Faster Than Your Systems

The dealer network expanded faster than anyone had anticipated. And fast growth, Armen learned, creates its own kind of problem.

As the national distribution footprint expanded, headcount at ARTO grew to 125 and the systems hadn’t kept pace with the scale. People weren’t being deployed effectively. The infrastructure needed to manage that level of growth hadn’t been built alongside the growth itself, and the result was exactly what you’d expect: a larger company that was harder to run, not easier.

Armen made the call to fix it. The company went to 85 people yet continued to grow. “We swelled to 125 people that weren’t being used properly,” he says. “Now we’re a bigger company with 85.”

That sentence is worth sitting with. A headcount reduction of roughly 30 percent, and the business is larger than before. The math only works when the problem was never the number of people, it was the structure around them.

Part of what made that restructuring possible was the operational model ARTO had built. Dealers display the product in their showrooms, customers order, and ARTO manufactures to specification. The model kept the business focused on what it was actually selling rather than on managing inventory it hadn’t moved yet.

The channel decision Armen made during the same period reflects the same kind of clear-eyed thinking. Rather than defaulting to traditional media, he went to Instagram. His reasoning was direct: “No words. Just pictures.” The product was visual, the platform was visual, and the buyer was already there. Women aged 24 through 55 were making most of the purchase decisions for ARTO’s product, and Instagram was where they were spending time. It outperformed anything traditional media would have delivered at a fraction of the cost.

Neither decision had anything to do with product quality. Both came from the same discipline which was looking honestly at how the business actually operated and making the structural change the numbers required.

Brand as a Business Decision

The distribution was built and the operation was running lean. The third decision is harder to assign a dollar figure to, but the returns accumulate differently.

He frames brand identity not as a marketing abstraction but as a practical business problem, and he does it with a single question most contractors haven’t thought to ask themselves. “If you’re the cabinet company and I walk into a home, how would I know it’s your cabinet?” Without a recognizable fingerprint, quality disappears into the project. The work is complete, the client is satisfied, and the business earns nothing compounding from it. The next job starts from zero.

He makes the point simply: “Even if the cabinets cost more than both of us put together, without an identity they’re just cabinets. They have no story.”

The aspiration he lays out is direct. “Be the Nike of your category,” he says. “People will fight each other at the train station for those Nikes.” It isn’t about advertising spend. It’s about building something with a recognizable identity so strong that customers feel its absence when they can’t have it. Armen jokes that when a client can’t use ARTO’s product because of time or budget, they feel like the project isn’t as good as it could have been. That kind of conviction in the market doesn’t arrive by accident.

His most concrete illustration of how this works in practice is also his smallest, a logo on a box. ARTO puts its branding on all four sides of every shipping box. At some point, friends started sending Armen pictures of an ARTO box spotted in the background of a DIY network show. No PR budget. No media placement. Just a box sitting on a job, with a logo on it, in a room someone happened to be filming. “Everyone is filming everything these days,” he says. “Make your packaging impossible to ignore.”

The principle he offers to contractors trying to establish a position in the luxury market is to be everywhere, but not everywhere. Concentrated, unmissable presence in the right places outperforms broad, forgettable presence spread thin. But presence without conviction behind it doesn’t sustain. “Part of it is believing it’s special,” he says. “There’s something about that belief that translates down the food chain.” If the owner doesn’t carry that conviction, no one further down the chain will. Not the sales rep, not the dealer, not the client standing in the showroom deciding whether to specify your product or someone else’s.

Armen didn’t make ARTO’s product more special. It was already exceptional before he stepped into the role. What he did was make the decision to treat it that way, visibly and consistently, down to the box it shipped in. The product earned the right to be in the room. The brand determines whether you get invited back.

One Friday at a Time

Armen’s father had a habit of telling him to stop reaching for his right ear with his left hand. The direct path was always there. Keep it simple.

When Armen describes how ARTO reached 60 years in business, he doesn’t talk about the product. He talks about lining up Fridays and getting to the next one, then the one after that. “The magic is just lining up a bunch of Fridays together.”

Three decisions, made over six decades, compounded into a national brand with 300 dealer locations and a consistent presence on some of the most demanding luxury projects in the country. None of them required a different product. All of them required an owner willing to treat the business itself as something worth building deliberately.

The craft earned the right to be in the market. The business decisions determined how far it could go.

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Armen Alajian co-owns ARTO with his brother, Varoujan “Vod” Alajian. Husband to Sally and father to eight, he is never more at peace than barefoot on the beach, knee deep in the waves. He enjoys solving puzzles while juggling chainsaws, and above all strives to be a good witness of Jesus.