Plumbing with a softer side?

This New Port Richey woman sees marketing potential in offering style to women.

By JODIE TILLMAN
Published August 1, 2007

Colleen Suojanen is opening The Pampering Plumber in Trinity next month, a high-end "service-oriented" plumbing fixture and bath product business. Here poses in the bathtub with some of her products at the business office in Odessa.
	[Times photo: Lance Aram Rothstein]

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Lance Aram Rothstein] Some of The Pampering Plumber's products » If you go Pampering Plumber The store is located in Trinity Village Center on State Road 54. The Web site is www.pamperingplumber.com. The phone number is (727) 232-8400.

TRINITY - Smell the lavender soap, feel the bear-shaped loofah, hear the sweet silence of a toilet that stopped running.

These are a few elements of Colleen Suojanen's vision: To create a "soft and fuzzy" plumbing company aimed at women.

Come into The Pampering Plumber when it opens at Trinity Village Center later this month, and you'll see as many candles and organic soaps as faucets. You'll see artsy door handles shaped like wrenches and a futuristic-looking dispatch center showing where the company's service vans are headed.

Think Aveda meets Roto-Rooter.

The new business is a spin-off of her family's company, Plumbers of Suojanen Enterprises. Her plumber husband, Erik, started that business 17 years ago.

Pampering Plumber will take over the parent company's residential service calls - leaky faucets and the like. But it will also emphasize a new concept: working with other companies - cabinetmakers and appliance distributors, for instance - to create one-stop shopping for kitchen and bathroom remodeling.

"We want to be the one contact for the whole job," said Suojanen a Finnish name pronounced "Soy ya nin".

What really makes Pampering Plumber stand out, though, is its marketing. Plumbing, says Suojanen, 38, is an industry with an image problem.

People think plumber, she says, and they think dirty and grimy. They think about pants that need to be hitched up.

"We're going to change that," she said.

Her plumbers will wear monogrammed uniforms. They will drive vans with side panels depicting a woman luxuriating in a bubble bath.

Not a lot of plumbing companies hope to pick up business by walk-in traffic to their storefronts. But here's Suojanen's dream scenario: Women drop by while waiting for a table at nearby Bonefish Grill. They browse and end up buying a bar of organic oatmeal soap. But when they've got a clogged pipe that needs fixing, they'll remember the Pampering Plumber.

As soft and sweet-smelling as it all sounds, Pampering Plumber is a company built of pragmatism. For years, the bread-and-butter of parent company Suojanen Enterprises was installing the plumbing for new single-family homes. Three years ago, the company had as many as 200 people on its payroll.

But as residential construction leveled off, the company has reduced its workforce to around 100. The company is now focused on commercial construction, says Suojanen, who has helped her husband run the business. This became the ideal time to dust off the Pampering Plumber concept she'd thought about three years ago.

By no means is Pampering Plumber the first construction business to target women, whom Suojanen calls "the decisionmakers." Home Depot and Lowe's, for instance, have a well-documented rivalry over the question of who is more woman-friendly.

But Suojanen says she'll offer women real distinction. "It's like going into Saks vs. going into Wal-Mart," she said.

Start-up costs for the Trinity operation were about $250,000, said Dan Harri, director of business development. If Pampering Plumber turns into a franchise, he said, company leaders want start-up costs to be about half that much.

Suojanen, a New Port Richey resident and mother of two, says she and her husband have spent the last year or so bouncing ideas off one another wherever they happen to meet.

"Some of our best meetings," she said, "are at the bathroom counter."

Jodie Tillman covers business in Pasco County. She can be reached at (727) 869-6247 or jtillman@sptimes.com.

[Last modified August 1, 2007, 05:14:49]