Name Calling

March 4, 2003

By Emerson Schwartzkopf

Words are my business.
Since the years of the first Nixon administration, I toiled over typewriters, hot-lead Linotypes, Telexes, Typositors, photo-film typesetters and more varieties of computer keyboards than I can remember. And, every time I sat before one of those devices, I agonized over the spelling, meaning, context and look of the words I used.
I still work hard in finding the right words. I always find that the fewer words used in a simple fashion, the better the results. It’s the free advice I offer to every writer – and, at present, to many sides of the stone trade.
There’s plenty of grumbling on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean about two words: natural stone. Some of the talk concerns a few legitimate beefs. Other arguments, though, could lead to bad feelings and the usual destination of the courtroom to settle the matter.
My take is to be simple and be done with it … because another group of people can make some decisions you’ll really dread.
Up until the 20th century, stone was, well, stone. It came from the ground, and someone cut, carved, shaped and polished it for a wealth of products from office buildings to tabletops. With new construction materials (such as poured concrete) and new processes for simulating the real thing (i.e., cast stone), the perception of stone use changed dramatically.
The dust-up that’s still taking shape involves, at first glance, engineered stone. Using some nine parts quartz to one part bonding resin, these products offer some of the qualities of quarried stone without the artificial look and feel of most solid-surface materials. The quartz surfaces also fall short in matching some of the aesthetics of quarried stone – try doing a diamond-match pattern, for example – but the reconstituted product is a thorn that’s growing sharper and deeper for some because it’s just not natural.
Fair enough, say some fabricators of granite and marble as well as the new slab material. But then, they note, how about all the work on quarried stone that’s chock full of filler, or when every square inch of surface gets a thick layer of epoxy laminate before final shaping and installation? Can’t someone alter a slab beyond a natural state? And what about terrazzo, where the finished product is somewhat rearranged from how it came out of the ground?
It’s a brouhaha that extends across the Atlantic to Italy, where the name tiff extended to developing a trademark – Pietra Naturale – to designate the stone from quarries and not from some non-natural process.
The Italian effort looks like an interesting idea, but it also shows some inherent problems in defining what’s “real” stone. A close look at some of the original trademark definitions by some of the Italian stone magazines revealed that the exacting specifications for natural stone and stone fill also managed to inadvertently leave a loophole to also qualify virtually any reconstituted stone product.
Stone identification problems in Europe, though, go beyond any concerns with quartz surfaces. A new study by Klaus Boerner, editor of the Natural Stones Worldwide CD-ROM reference, and a Dusseldorf attorney shows that ceramic-tile companies are doing more than making surfaces that imitate stone; those tiles are now sold under more than 260 names also used to identify natural stone, including Galaxy Black and Indian Gold.
Defining what’s natural stone and what isn’t will involve more than searching out ceramic tiles masquerading as travertine and debating surface content, though. New products will cause semantic and specification hair-splitting that’s sure to please very, very few in the industry.
Take, for example, Marshall Innovative Technologies’ LiteStone, with ultra-thin sheets of marble and granite bonded to a reinforced fiberglass substrate. The resulting product, at a thickness of 1/4” for marble and 3/8” for granite, can be fabricated with machinery geared for solid-surface; and, it sells at a much-lower cost than anything finished from a slab.
Is it natural stone? Plenty of stone fabricators would say no, but try and leave LiteStone out of any natural-stone category – and still include pre-fabricated sections of stone tile, marble with a fiberglass-mesh backing, and anything clad to pre-cast concrete. It’s possible, but you’ll end up with volumes of meandering and confusing specifications.
The solid-surface industry won’t make natural-stone definitions and marketing any easier in the future, either. It knows the effect of stone becoming more cost-competitive; the International Solid Surface Fabricators Association moved to kick natural stone out of last month’s Solid Surface 2003 show in Las Vegas, and nearly excluded engineered stone as well. New solid-surface products, such as Wilsonart’s earthstone™, meanwhile, are inching ever closer to a natural-stone look.
All of these new products and names aren’t going to confuse the ultimate arbiters – the architects, specifiers and residential consumers – as much as giving them a wider selection of surfaces and prices. The push in the market isn’t to pass off an alternative surface as natural stone; instead, they’re being sold that these products are better.
To get clients to select natural stone, they need more than trademark or a seal of approval. They need a reason, whether it’s in the unique look and variety of quarried stone, or its ultimate durability, or its classic appeal.
And, as some fabricators are learning, goods such as engineered stone have a definite place in a shop’s product line. It’s not a replacement for marble, granite, travertine and slate, but it’s a good alternative that clients choose for reasons other than cost.
In short, it’s not about names. It’s about service and quality products, and that the name you want customers to use is yours when they need the job done right.