About: Ameé Quiriconi
- Website
- http://www.tmi-online.com
- Details
- From graduate school paper to reality, the story of how Squak Mountain Stone™ came to be is almost cliché these days. In January of 2003, while finishing up her Master’s degree, Ms. Quiriconi prepared an economics paper for one of her classes. The assignment, based on Michael Shuman’s book Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, required the students to come up with an “import substitution”. That is, find something in their community that is purchased from someone outside of that community and then develop a “substitute” for that item that could be made & sold within the local economy. This assignment turned into a business venture for Ms. Quiriconi and by the end of 2003, leveraging her experience in architecture and construction and further tapping into her personal strengths of perseverance and even stubbornness, she had developed a unique new product called Squak Mountain Stone™. When Ameé finally arrived at point where she could no longer do it alone, she began to enlist the help of others. A friend she’d known since they were 16 years old came in to help with the “heavy lifting” and a local King County program called LinkUp provided funding for independent testing. Finally, a nationally recognized environmental building supply retailer came forward to provide the first round of “beta tester” customers and Squak Mountain Stone™ went from the novel idea formed on paper and developed in a garage to a real product for the real world. Today, she makes handmade Squak Mountain Stone™ countertops and tabletops out of a small shop in Woodinville, with a couple of other employees. Her products, sold in stores around the Western United States, are found in homes and businesses throughout the entire country.
