For most of the twentieth century, the global stone trade was a chain of brokers. Quarry operators sold to local agents, who sold to consolidators, who sold to importers, who sold to fabricators. Each link added a markup, a delay, and an information loss. By the time a slab reached an architect’s hand, three intermediaries usually stood between them and the rock.
What gets lost in the chain
The cost of intermediation is not just margin. It’s information. When something goes wrong — a colour shift between blocks, a fault line in a slab, a delayed shipment — you cannot trace it back through three middlemen with confidence. The quarry that produced it has long forgotten the order. The agent has moved on to the next consignment. Accountability dissolves.
We saw this play out for the first decade of our business. We were that quarry — selling through agents, learning about complaints months after the stone had shipped, with no way to fix the original cause. The economics were workable but the relationships felt distant. Buyers we’d never spoken to were depending on us, and we had no clean line back to them.
What changes with direct ownership
In 2010, we began the process of cutting out the chain. We pulled our products back from agents in Europe and the GCC and started selling directly to importers and fabricators. By 2015, every container leaving Srikakulam had a single counterparty on the receiving end whom we knew by name.
“The agent model optimises for transactions. The direct model optimises for relationships. They are different businesses pretending to be the same one.”
What changed wasn’t the stone. It was the feedback loop. We could now hear within days when a buyer’s expectation didn’t match what arrived. We could trace the exact block back to the exact week of extraction. We could send a technical team in person when problems were complex. The product quality didn’t just improve — it became defendable.
What it means for partners
For the architects, importers, and stone showrooms we work with, direct ownership translates into three things they can rely on. Consistency — because the quarry team and the export team are the same team. Transparency — because there’s no agent layer obscuring origin or pricing. Accountability — because if anything goes wrong, the call goes directly to us, not through three intermediaries.
None of this is the cheapest possible model. But cheapest was never our brief. Our brief, set thirty-two years ago, was to be the supplier our customers come back to — year after year, project after project. Direct ownership is what makes that promise possible.