Founder and director Harry Norman on creating a successful business that fills a gap in the stone market.

How did you get into the industry?

I have always had a passion for the outdoors. When I was young, my family were in landscaping in South London, where I was working as a labourer and cutting grass for domestic clients at the age of 15. Looking back, I realise how clients trusted us young guys to work in their treasured gardens, which taught us how much it meant to provide a service to them. It taught me how to care for people.

After relocating to Somerset over 20 years ago, I got into a sales role for a couple of years, which taught me a lot about the skills I needed to listen and how to negotiate.

What gap in the market led you to set up Allgreen?

My brother, Aleks, and I looked at ourselves as relatively new and young guys to the industry when we set up Allgreen in 2005. We found we had to spend a considerable amount of time sourcing different stones from multiple quarries before narrowing down to a final stone of choice. So, we decided we would bring lots of stone together in a way that no one’s really seen before to create a range which is unique, while sticking with natural products.

We’re surrounded by quarries in Somerset. From Mendip Hills to Portland stone, we’ve got limestones coming out our ears around here! That gave us a massive advantage because the quarries’ waste products could be turned into unique products, and that’s continued to today where we crafted a niche.

We’re all about the possibilities with stone. Starting with a raw boulder and you can utilise the natural faces, or you can carve it, cut it, work it, finish it, profile it, and then be creative with the waste to create new formats and styles. In the last 15 years, we’ve focused on designers and what they needed, listened and worked closely with them, and then shaped a business around what their needs were.

What’s been crucial to building the business since then?

The crucial bit is getting the team to work cohesively and passionately together. A solid management team is important, and a team that is happy to find new ways to tackle challenges and take on everything that’s thrown at them. It basically comes down to developing a vision that people want to be part of.

How do you maintain a successful business and create trusting relationships with clients?

Successful, trusting relationships mean everything to us but sometimes things don’t go to plan and I’ll be the first one to put my hand up and say this. But we hate letting people down and we focus on continuous improvement. It is vitally important for us to build and maintain strong relationships with our clients by listening to them. We also want to consistently demonstrate that we are proactively making a difference.

Tell us about your range of products.

We have a unique range of natural stone products sourced, but the bespoke products make up half of our business. It’s heavily technical and involves workshop drawings, CAD saws and specialist knowledge in what the stone can handle or how we can finish it.

We also continuously run Know Your Stone Workshop sessions. They vary from interactive one-to-one sessions or taught to a classroom of 50 people. We talk about how to use stone, the right applications, which stones are good for what areas, comparing bad and good profiles and what you can and can’t do with stone.

How do you work to improve environmental impact?

This goes right to the heart of what we do. We don’t officially own a piece of land where we can just quarry any stone we like, but we partner with quarries and work closely with them ensuring ethical and responsible practice while understanding what their byproducts are. We reuse masonry offcuts or quarry scraps into stackers, mallets or create organic formats such as ‘crazy paving’, stepping stones and steps.

We work closely with the local agricultural community who readily collect our offcuts to use as a substitute for quarried aggregates for making tracks and bases in their barns. There is not a single bit of waste that is not used. Even the dust from the saws is collected up and blended, so it can all help bind and lock it down. We’re also working to reduce carbon, using the Elemental tool to establish a generic carbon measure. We’ll then measure specifically depending on what stone and format it is, and even down to how it’s delivered.

What’s your favourite part about the industry?

It takes us to places that you could only dream about. So, for example, working on projects for the Royal household gives us an opportunity to be part of a legacy, or a HNWI owned country estate where you’d never normally get access to.

What outdoor design trends do you think we’ll see in 2027?

We’re seeing and looking to embrace more natural shapes, such as working with stone as they form organically. This is often seen in ‘crazy paving’ or organic shape paving where the stone is literally used in its natural form but also in cladding, cobbles and mosaics. Hospitality and wellness spaces are responsible for driving trends. The use of stone in these public areas can spark inspiration.

What’s on the horizon for Allgreen?

We’ve been growing steadily for a while, but it’s exciting with some new investments we are making in technology and machinery, on top of the potential of new transfer hubs in different locations. We’re trialling the implementation of AI in our reporting, administrative tasks and processes for accuracy and enhanced efficiency. If we don’t embrace it, we’re going to become extinct. We will only implement something when we’re happy as a team that it is going to make a difference.