Twenty years to a name

Before there was a shop, there was a bench. We're Santa Cruz natives, and the cutting started more than twenty years ago — first as collecting, then as learning to put a polish on what we'd collected, then as the thing we did every day. Nobody plans that. You just look up one year and the garage is a lapidary studio.

Facebook came first. It's still our longest-running channel — the page grew slowly, post by post, to the 89,000 people who follow it now, and a lot of them have been there for most of the ride. The Etsy shop opened in 2014. Eleven years later it's at 2,225 sales and a Star Seller badge, which we're proud of mostly because of what it took: photographing every single stone ourselves, answering every question in detail, and describing every flaw before anyone had to ask.

Why opals, of everything

Plenty of stones are beautiful. Opal is the only one that moves. Tilt a good piece a few degrees and the color rolls, switches, disappears, comes back somewhere else. After twenty years that still gets us — there are pieces we cut years ago that we still pick up off the shelf just to watch.

The other reason is the supply chain, or rather how short ours is. Rough comes to the bench directly from the people who mine it — Lightning Ridge and the Queensland boulder fields, Welo in Ethiopia through proper export verification, Querétaro in Mexico. No broker chain means we know what we're cutting, and you know what you're buying.

We cannot see our reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.

That line has been pinned to our Pinterest board for years. It's about as close to a mission statement as we'll ever get. The work is slow on purpose — one cutter, one bench, one stone at a time.