PROGRESS: Minnesota firm takes over Luken Memorial's showrooms

Sunburst Memorials, a subsidiary of St. Cloud, Minn.-based Monumental Sales, now operates Luken showrooms in Sioux City, Onawa and Norfolk, Neb. Sunburst already had a location in Norfolk, and those two locations combined. 

Yankton, S.D.-based Luken is keeping its Yankton office. 

Bob Luken, the proprietor of Luken along with his sister, Tina Luken Ziegler, said the decision to sell to Sunburst was partly prompted by high demand meeting their finite production capacity and partly because the family has "reached that stage of life" at which some family members are retiring while the younger family members aren't interested in taking over. 

"We were basically hitting a wall for our production limits, so we had to do something," Luken said. 

Employees at the Sioux City, Onawa and Norfolk showrooms were retained in the transition. 

Luken said that Sunburst was a good fit because of its quality standards, culture and personnel are on par with Luken. Sunburst had already made some inroads into the market in this area, which Lunken described as "friendly competition." 

"They do about the same carving techniques as us here, so the average person could not tell our product apart, which is really what we were looking for as a company, for a good fit," Luken said. 

The Sioux City and Onawa showrooms are Sunburst's first physical presence in Iowa, Sunburst sales manager Jason Crandall said in an email to the Journal. The company, which traces its history back to 1917, is entirely employee-owned. Sunburst's monument fabrication is done at a centralized facility the company operates in St. Cloud. Monumental Sales, the parent company, also owns Granite Kitchen & Bath and Custom Limestone Products. 

"St. Cloud's very close (to Sioux City)" Luken said. "Quarries are all over the world, and some monument companies have the quarries do the lettering, which could be many states away." 

Serious discussions of a sale began in the spring of 2019; Luken made the first overture. The COVID-19 pandemic slowed the transaction considerably, but it was completed by December. 

"This sale was supposed to happen almost a year before, but then COVID came along and got involved and everything got put on hold for a while," said Rick Garvey, the manager of the Sunburst (formerly Luken) showroom in Sioux City. Garvey has worked there since 2006. 

The new ownership, oddly enough, brings Luken somewhat full circle. The firm was founded in Yankton in the early 1950s by Bob Luken's grandfather and father, Frank and Robert "Bob" Luken, who learned the trade in their native St. Cloud, where Sunburst is based. 

Sometime around 1962, Luken bought out a monument company in South Sioux City and operated there along East 13th Street for decades, until they purchased their current location at 1315 Zenith Drive, just off Hamilton Boulevard, roughly 16 years ago. 

Luken operated a plant and carving center in Rapid City for decades and did a considerable amount of high-profile granite work at Mount Rushmore, with the exception of the faces that depict U.S. presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

"Everything out at Mount Rushmore, except Mount Rushmore, we had a hand in, in one way or the other. Our history with Mount Rushmore goes back many, many years," Luken said. 

In the Sioux City metro, one of Luken's best-known projects is the half-scale version of the black-granite Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall at Siouxland Freedom Park in South Sioux City. The wall's granite was carved in Yankton; the project took several years, and was completed in 2014. 

Monuments ordered through Luken's offices have long been produced at their Yankton facility. Luken said that existing, previously arranged sales will be done at Yankton but that monuments sold going forward will be produced at Sunburst's Minnesota facility. 

"We'll be working on a lot of those memorials over the course of 2021," Luken said. 

Garvey, the Sioux City showroom manager, described Sunburst as somewhat more technology-driven than its predecessor. Not surprisingly, the customers have been moving in the same direction. 

"Somebody like yourself even could go online and design a memorial. I mean, there are apps and programs online that customers could go on and design what they want to buy," Garvey said.