Altrock

Can you explain for us what terrazzo is, and what makes Altrock’s approach so unique?

Terrazzo is material created using a technique that’s actually thousands of years old with some of the earliest examples found around the Middle East. It’s basically an old method for reusing marble and stone, where scraps and offcuts would be crushed up, mixed with concrete, and then used to make decorative concrete floors in villas.

It was always a method of recycling marble materials, which is something we've tried to keep with. We source the chunks of broken marble as offcuts from the industry or quarries. To make our product, we’ve updated the recipe—we use a resin base instead of cement, which is non-porous and a lot stronger, which means we can make really rich, beautiful colors for the backgrounds for any kind of surface.

What was the moment you knew Altrock had gone from just an idea, to a real business?

Altrock was just part of one of the many experiments I was doing with a friend of mine who is an interior stylist using a bit stone, playing about. We made some samples and put some pictures up online, got some quite good feedback from a lot of people and decided maybe there was something in it. So, yeah, here we are.

But I guess what really makes something real is the brand. And at the start of it, the website is everything. The website is the brand. Squarespace was a great platform for telling the story that I wanted to tell, and giving me a place to use the imagery of what we were going to make.

What role does your Squarespace play in your business?

Basically every client we've got has come through the contact form on our website. Whether it's the website they found or they've been linked by some other means, they've had a chance to read all about our process and the way we make our product before they get in touch.

Feedback I’ve had from customers is that people love to see the way things are made. It's really intrinsic to decisions they make about what to spend their money on. They really like to see where it's come from, so with the green aspect of what we do—finding recycled materials—it's important that we've got that space on the website where people can read about it.