Artisode; Buying Green: American Clay

So the product itself is a clay base plaster, an earthen plaster, meaning it is meant to go on to a prepared wall to give you a unique texture, unique color, unique surface. So it literally is applied instead of texture and paint or in a remodel situation to change your texture and go over what's existing and give you a new look. When we first started, we were really focused on the natural, the grass roots aspects, strawberry homes, the dobes, people that were interested in really utilizing natural materials. And that's how I was approaching green. When we got more in the market, we discovered that green was more of an energy approach and a recycling approach more so than a natural aspect.

And so we had to adjust our thoughts of, rather than pushing it as a natural material, we had to really push it as a green material, beautiful material, something that really added to the aesthetics of a home, but at the same time didn't add any VOCs or organic compounds or those aspects that are looked at when looking at indoor air quality. The clay is themselves because they're natural. We think that people have more of a connection and it introduces them back to that Earth, back to that semblance of comfort. With the product we have 43 standard colors that we've introduced to the line, we started originally with 12 so we've been continuously adding that and the source for those additional changes have primarily been through doing custom colors for people. We've done upwards

of probably a thousand custom colors, always trying to utilize the pigments that we have in our inventory and staying as natural as we possibly can. So we have a very flexible range. One of our biggest challenges though, we're not going to get a red as vibrant and bright as my shirt because we made a conscious choice to use natural mineral pigments and we also made a conscious choice to stay away from those that would be considered a heavy metal like a cadmium or a mammalian has a light content that would be higher than what we would like and that would be healthy in the environment. So we've stayed with the more benign like the iron oxides and those kinds of oxides rather than going to those more vibrant colors. American Clayton Enterprises is based here in Albuquerque in Mexico and we started originally in about 3,000 square facility. We had three employees and we just recently moved this past August into about 15,000 square feet and

we currently have 15 employees. We distribute both nationally through approximately 27 national distributors and then we have over 150 dealers that carry their products here in the United States and then we have currently three international distributors, one in Japan, New Zealand and Canada. It is introducing and educating us as a society and us as a people as a whole that we can utilize natural materials in our building systems and still maintain modern building techniques. We don't have to continuously rely on petroleum as a source of finish in our homes and we can move in a direction that becomes more sustainable as a whole.