The Question Everyone Asks Me
I'm the procurement manager at a 40-person commercial construction firm. For the past six years, I've managed our finishes budget—roughly $180,000 a year in tile alone, give or take—negotiated with 25-plus vendors, and logged every order in our cost tracking system.
The question I get most often, from contractors, designers, even our own project managers, is simple: "Is Marazzi tile good?"
I understand why they ask. Marazzi has a strong reputation. Marazzi Tile USA distributes widely, so products are easy to source here. And the lineup—from wood-look porcelain to the Marazzi glass mosaic tile collections—is extensive. But asking whether Marazzi is "good" is the wrong question. It isn't the question that saves you money. And I've watched people lose money asking it.
The Surface Problem: Comparing Price Per Square Foot
Most people buy tile the same way they buy drywall. Get quotes, divide by square footage, pick the lowest. I did the same thing my first year. It cost us.
Here's a real comparison from Q2 2024. We were quoting a 4,200-square-foot commercial ground floor. One vendor quoted a porcelain tile at $2.87 per square foot. The other, for the Marazzi equivalent, came in at $3.42. Don't quote me on the exact dollar figures—this was months ago and I don't have the quote in front of me—but the spread is accurate. On paper, the first quote saves $2,310. Looks like a no-brainer.
It wasn't.
The Deep Causes: Where Costs Actually Hide
When I ran both quotes through our total-cost-of-ownership spreadsheet—a tool I built after getting burned on hidden fees twice—that $2,310 gap basically disappeared.
The Waste Factor
Our lead installer has been in the trade for close to two decades. He flagged the cheaper tile's breakage rate during cutting, from having installed both products before. We ordered 12% extra for waste—a policy I put in place after the March 2023 incident I'm about to describe—and that ate a sizeable chunk of the paper savings.
Shade Variation
The cheaper tile had more variation between boxes. Or rather, it wasn't necessarily more variation in total, but it was distributed randomly enough that the crew had to stop, re-sort pallets, and blend boxes to keep the floor uniform. That's labor. In our market, skilled labor runs $85–$120 an hour depending on the crew. It doesn't appear on the quote, but it appears on the invoice.
Substrate Conditions Nobody Budgets For
Then there's the wall. That project included tile backsplashes in a restroom, and the walls had chipped paint that needed attention first. Tiling over peeling paint is a fast route to hollow tiles and callback work. The fix—scraping loose paint, sanding edges, priming, skim coating—isn't hard, but it takes time. And time is the budget killer nobody sees coming.
If you're wondering how to repair chipped paint before tiling: scrape away the loose areas, sand the edges smooth, apply a bonding primer, and patch with lightweight compound. Wait for full drying before any thinset goes up. Half a day of prep can save the cost of an entire redo.
The Price of Getting It Wrong
The March 2023 incident changed how I think about all of this. We placed a $3,000 order for a premium tile from a well-known distributor. It arrived late, in the wrong finish, with the wrong shade. Three weeks of schedule slip. A $1,200 redo that the warranty didn't cover due to a paperwork technicality.
I didn't fully understand the value of detailed specifications until that moment. Everything I'd read about tile procurement said the same thing—premium brands hide the markups, commodity products are the smarter play. In practice, I found the reverse. The brand mattered less than the process, but consistent brands made the process dramatically easier to control.
I want to be fair here. This isn't a Marazzi infomercial. I've seen cheaper tiles perform perfectly well in the right context. And I've seen Marazzi products used badly—a polished porcelain on a wet exterior walkway is a slip hazard regardless of the logo. The cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest project.
The Forged Carbon Fiber Lesson
One more example, because it's fresh. A designer asked me to price a showroom accent wall in forged carbon fiber—that dark, woven, metallic finish from high-end automotive design. The custom quote was astronomical. I opened the email twice to make sure I was reading it right.
We ended up with a matte charcoal porcelain in large format, paired with a brushed metal-look trim. The visual effect was close enough that the client couldn't tell the difference, at less than half the cost.
That outcome wasn't obvious upfront. It became obvious once we stopped asking "how do we buy forged carbon fiber" and started asking "what effect does the client actually want?" The same logic applies to tile brands. The right question isn't "is Marazzi good." The right question is: does this product, for these site conditions and performance needs, deliver the outcome we need at a predictable cost?
The Sample Policy I Wish I'd Started Earlier
Looking back, I should have built a physical sample review into our workflow from day one. At the time, it felt unnecessary. Product photos looked fine. Spec sheets looked complete. They weren't.
Now, any tile order above $1,000 requires physical samples, no exceptions. For a recent project, we compared two glass mosaic options that looked nearly identical in the catalog. In person, under the site's LED lighting, one washed out completely while the other caught the light beautifully. No photo could have told us that.
Shipping samples is cheap. USPS large-envelope rates are $1.50 for a standard 12" × 15" mailer as of January 2025 (verify current pricing at usps.com/stamps). We spend maybe $1,200 a year on sample shipping. Against the change orders and rework it prevents, that's the best ROI in our budget.
What I'd Do Differently
If I could redo my first two years in this role, I'd stop comparing prices per square foot and start comparing total installed costs. I'd order more samples. I'd check the substrate before ordering, not after. I'd get quotes from at least three vendors and read the fine print. I'd budget 10–12% waste without apologizing for it. And if a manufacturer makes environmental claims—"recycled content," "sustainable sourcing"—I'd ask for the documentation behind it. Per FTC Green Guides (ftc.gov), those claims need substantiation. A legitimate manufacturer provides it without a fight.
Here's the bottom line: the tile itself is almost never where the money gets away from you. It's the system around it—the site condition nobody checked, the sample nobody ordered, the specification nobody verified. Fix those, and you can evaluate a brand like Marazzi on actual merits: consistency across batches, reliability through the Marazzi Tile USA supply chain, and products that install the way the spec says they will. For us, that consistency has measurably lowered rework. That's worth paying for.
But only when you're also doing the work to prevent the real cost drivers. The brand isn't the shortcut. The process is.
I wish someone had told me that in 2019. I'd still have made mistakes—everyone does. But I'd have made fewer.
