Sourcing regional products gets easier

"It's staggering how far 500 miles goes

Many of the world’s inventions were born of necessity. So it was with spec near here, a new Web site launched in February and created by Chicago-based Kathryn Quinn Architects, which realized how hard it can be to claim local manufacturing credits on Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design projects.

spec near here provides a tool for a simple search to assist in locating regional manufacturers of building materials. Subscribers—who pay $12 per month—input the address of a project site, a material being specified using standard codes from the Construction Specification Institute (CSI) and a designated radius of up to 500 miles. In return they receive a custom map pinpointing the location of manufacturers of the specified product, says Kathryn Quinn, principal of both Kathryn Quinn Architects and spec near here.

spec near here differs from similar sites because in the way it manages its manufacturer database and because it uses the CSI codes, according to Quinn. The lists of manufacturers on similar sites tend to be out of date, she says. spec near here manually checked the thousands of listings in its database and is updating them based on responses to e-mail campaigns run during the site’s launch. Additionally, it is free for manufacturers to list themselves in the site’s database. “We didn’t want to hinder any small mom and pop shop from being included,” she says.

spec near here employs three people and has no subscriber base yet, though it includes manufacturers all over the United States and in Canada.  “We’re coming online at a very odd time in our economy and our industry is probably the most decimated,” Quinn says. “We would be thrilled in three years to have a subscriber base of 40,000 or 50,000.”