What We Built: Sites, Slabs, and Sample Boxes
There's a moment every material goes through on its way from raw shell to finished surface, and this past stretch has been full of those moments for us: the first sample boxes leaving our hands, a stubborn finishing problem finally solved, a processing site coming fully online. We wanted to share where things stand.
The first boxes are shipped
The first six sample boxes have shipped to pilot and pre-order customers. Each one includes gel-coated samples across our full range of colorways, a printed catalog, and materials meant to help you picture Urchinite in your own space, not just read about it. Getting here took finishing every color variation of our sample slabs, one of the quieter but more demanding parts of bringing a material like this to market.
The infrastructure behind the material
None of this happens without the physical groundwork. Our preprocessing site in Ukiah is now fully operational, with water, sewer, trash, and electricity all in place. In Oakland, we've stood up our warehouse manufacturing setup and brought on the equipment to run it. Alongside that, we've grown our team, including a Mineral Logistics Technician and Production Technician, so we can keep pace with demand instead of letting it outrun us.
We're also building out regional distribution partnerships to get Urchinite to projects across California and beyond, and our commercial pilot program is advancing, with emerging partnerships bringing the material into pilot projects and showroom installations.
Still rooted in restoration
Even as production scales, the work that Urchinite exists to support hasn't slowed down. Our collaboration with conservation partners at the Big River site in Mendocino continues this season, including dockside monitoring and field tests alongside the ongoing urchin harvest. Every shell that becomes a slab is still, first, part of that restoration story.
What's next
We'll keep shipping sample boxes to pre-order and pilot customers over the coming months, and we're ramping up trial production of biocalcites for this season's pilot installs. More soon.