Our story — Meet IAN
I moved to Ballarat from Brisbane in 2019, partly because rent was half what I was paying on the north side of the city, and partly because I needed a clean break. I had two kids in primary school, a car that needed new tyres, and about $1,400 left in a savings account I'd been pretending was a buffer. I was doing casual admin work for a logistics company in Delacombe and picking up weekend shifts wherever I could. The work was fine. It paid enough to cover the basics most weeks. But there was no headroom, no margin for anything to go wrong, and things kept going wrong. I needed to find something that could actually grow.
Before the move I'd spent about eight years working in procurement for a small construction materials business in Fortitude Valley. I understood stone and timber better than most people who sell it. I knew what Tasmanian Blackwood cost per metre at the mill, I knew the difference between quarried and synthetic stone, and I knew that a lot of what was being sold in the homewares market was marked up four or five times by the time it hit a boutique shelf in Fitzroy or Paddington. That gap between what things actually cost and what people were paying for them sat in the back of my head for years. I just hadn't figured out what to do with that knowledge yet.
In March 2021 I drove down to a Sunday market at the Ballarat Showgrounds and spent $180 on a folding table and a tablecloth. I had six pieces with me, sourced through a contact at a stone and timber supplier I'd used back in Queensland. Everything sold before midday. That was the decision moment. Not some big plan, just the realisation that if I could sell six pieces in three hours in the cold in Ballarat, I could probably build something real around it. I registered the business, sorted the ABN, and started placing small orders. Quarry Ridge Co was trading properly by August 2021.
We're based in Byron Bay now, which is where the workshop and dispatch run from. I still source directly from suppliers I've vetted myself, mostly in Tasmania and New Zealand, and I check every order before it goes out. The kids are older. The car has new tyres. Things are not perfect but they're a lot more stable than that $1,400 buffer in 2019. I'm not interested in being the biggest homewares brand in Australia. I'm interested in staying solvent, keeping quality consistent, and building something that still makes sense in ten years.
— Built from scratch, one order at a time. — IAN, IAN NEIL PRATT
Journal
How I finally tracked down the right blackwood mill
Finding timber that actually photographs well and holds up to a wet knife took longer than I expected, and cost more than I budgeted.
I spent about six weeks emailing sawmills before anyone replied with something useful. Most of the responses were either minimum order quantities I couldn't touch, or they were selling blackwood that had been sitting in a shed so long the grain had gone grey and flat. Tasmanian blackwood, when it's properly dried and fresh off the mill, has this warm honey colour with a faint ripple through it. That's what I needed for the cheese boards. I wasn't going to photograph something that looked like a piece of scrap fence paling and expect anyone to pay $89 for it.
The mill I eventually found is in the Huon Valley, south of Hobart. A small family operation, two brothers, and they responded to my third follow-up email which I had basically given up on. They were cutting blackwood slabs for furniture makers and had offcuts going to waste. That suited me fine. I buy the offcuts at a fixed rate per kilogram, which keeps my cost of goods manageable, and it means nothing is sitting in landfill. That's not a marketing angle, it's just a practical arrangement that works for both of us.
The first batch I received was 23 pieces. I rejected 7 of them on the spot, mostly because of knot placements that would have made the boards structurally weak under pressure. A cheese board that cracks when someone leans on it with a hard knife is a return I don't want to deal with. The 16 that made it through became the first run of boards that went into the shop. I priced them at $89 each, which felt high to me at the time but covered freight from Tassie, my finishing time, and left a margin I could actually reinvest.
Finishing is just food-safe oil, applied twice, left to cure for 48 hours between coats. I do it at the kitchen table after the kids are in bed. There's nothing complicated about it, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What takes time is the sanding, particularly getting the edges smooth enough that they don't snag on a linen tablecloth. I go through a lot of sandpaper. It's not glamorous work but it's consistent, and consistent is what keeps the reviews clean.
I've now ordered from the Huon Valley mill four times. The quality has stayed steady, which matters more to me than almost anything else at this stage. One variable I can't control is freight timing, and I've had a pallet sit in a Hobart depot over a long weekend before, which is frustrating. But I'd rather deal with that than switch suppliers and start the whole vetting process again from scratch.
What I actually put on the slate platter on weeknights
The platter gets used three or four times a week here, not just when someone comes over, and the way I use it has changed how I style the photos.
I started using the Kiwi Slate Platter properly at home about four months ago, meaning I stopped saving it for when I was taking product shots and just put it on the table at dinner. It changed how I think about the product. Slate holds temperature differently to timber or ceramic. It stays cool, which means soft cheese from the fridge doesn't sweat and pool in the same way. On a Tuesday night in Ballarat in July, when I'm putting out some King Island brie and whatever crackers are left in the pantry, that actually matters.
The platter is 38 centimetres long, which is a practical size. It fits across the middle of a four-person table without dominating it, and it holds enough food that you're not refilling it every five minutes. I've seen a lot of platters in this category that are too small to be genuinely useful or so large they only work for a catered event. This one lands in the right spot. I use it for cheese and charcuterie most often, but I've also put olives on it, some dried figs from the Mildura farmers market, and once a full row of oysters when my sister visited.
Cleaning slate is simple: wipe it with a damp cloth, dry it immediately, don't submerge it in water. That's it. I put a note about this in every order that goes out because people assume stone products need some kind of special treatment, and then they either over-complicate it or they put the thing in the dishwasher. The dishwasher will dull the surface and eventually cause micro-cracks. I've tested this so customers don't have to. One platter, one dishwasher cycle, ruined. Now I know.
The Kiwi slate itself comes from New Zealand's South Island, which is where the name comes from. It's a fine-grained grey-green stone, denser than most slate I've handled, and it doesn't chip easily at the edges. I've dropped one onto a tiled floor from bench height and it survived. That's not a selling point I advertise but it's something I noticed, and it gave me confidence in the product. You want to know the things you're selling will hold up in a real kitchen, not just in a styled photograph.
I take most of my product photos on this platter now, even for other products. The grey-green tone is neutral enough that it doesn't compete with whatever is sitting on it. The opal candle holders look particularly good against it. That's a happy accident I didn't plan for, but it's made the visual side of the shop more consistent without me having to think too hard about it.
Packing 34 orders in a garage in May
The Mother's Day rush hit harder than last year, and I had 34 orders to pack across a single weekend with no help and a lot of bubble wrap.
I should have hired someone for the Mother's Day weekend. I know that now. I had 34 orders come through in the 10 days leading up to it, which is more than double my usual weekly volume, and I packed all of them myself across Saturday and Sunday while my kids watched more television than I'm comfortable admitting. The garage is where I work. It's not insulated, and in Ballarat in late autumn the temperature drops to about 8 degrees by nine at night. I have a small oil heater that takes 20 minutes to do anything useful.
Packing stone and timber products for freight is not quick. You can't just drop something in a satchel. The marble and jadeite coasters set, for example, has 4 coasters that need to be individually wrapped in tissue, then separated by foam, then boxed, then the box needs to be cushioned inside the outer carton. If I rush any step in that process I risk a breakage, and a breakage means a replacement at my cost, plus the freight to send it, plus the time to communicate with the customer. I've done the numbers. One broken order wipes the margin on about four successful ones.
The opal stone candle holders are the most fragile thing I ship. Opal is beautiful but it's not a hard stone. It has a Mohs hardness of around 5.5 to 6.5, which means it scratches and chips more readily than the slate or marble pieces. I double-box those. The inner box is snug, the outer box has at least 4 centimetres of cushioning on every side. It adds cost and it adds time but I've had zero breakages on the candle holders since I started doing it this way, compared to two in my first month of trading when I was being optimistic about single-box packaging.
I use Australia Post eParcel for most orders and StarTrack for anything going to regional addresses that I know from experience take longer through the standard network. Toowoomba and Mount Gambier both fall into that category for me. I've had packages sit in a Brisbane depot for four days en route to Toowoomba, which is a two-hour drive from Brisbane. That's not something I can fix, but I can flag it in my dispatch confirmation email so the customer isn't checking the tracking obsessively wondering where their order is.
After that weekend I wrote a basic production schedule for the next major gifting period, which is Christmas. I'm not going to be caught flat again. The plan is to pre-pack a set number of units in the two weeks before, so when orders come in during the peak days I'm pulling finished parcels off a shelf rather than starting from raw product. It sounds obvious. I don't know why I didn't do it sooner.
July is slow and I've stopped pretending otherwise
Every July since I started this business has been quiet, and I've finally accepted that quiet is part of the pattern rather than a sign something is wrong.
Last July I made $1,840 in revenue across the whole month. The month before was nearly four times that. I spent a lot of July convinced I had done something wrong, that a product description was off, that my photos had suddenly stopped working, that I'd been shadow-banned somewhere. I changed things I shouldn't have changed and stressed about things I couldn't control. This July I made $2,100, which is better, and I spent the quiet weeks doing things that actually needed doing rather than refreshing analytics every two hours.
What I did instead: I re-photographed the marble and jadeite coasters set. The original photos were taken in summer with strong afternoon light coming through the kitchen window, and they look warm and golden in a way that doesn't match winter at all. I re-shot them on an overcast Saturday morning, no artificial light, just the diffused grey coming through the glass, and the coasters looked completely different. The green in the jadeite came forward. The white marble veining looked sharper. Those photos are now the main images in the shop and the coasters have been one of my better sellers in the months since.
I also finally wrote proper care instructions for every product category. Not the one-liner I'd been using, but actual paragraphs that explain why slate shouldn't go in the dishwasher, how often to re-oil the blackwood boards (roughly every 3 months with regular use, more if they're being washed frequently), and what to do if an opal candle holder gets a surface scratch. A fine-grit wet-and-dry sandpaper, 1200 grit, very light pressure, followed by a polish with a soft cloth. It takes 5 minutes and it works. I know because I've done it on my own holders.
The other thing July gave me was time to go to the Ballarat Farmers Market on a Saturday morning without rushing. That sounds small but it matters. I use the market to look at how other makers and producers present things, what's selling, what's sitting, how people talk about their products to strangers. I picked up some local walnuts and a jar of fig paste from a grower near Daylesford, and I put them on the slate platter that evening for a photo. That image got more engagement than anything I'd posted in two months. Sometimes the answer is just slowing down enough to notice what's in front of you.
I'm not going to dress up a slow month as a strategic retreat or a period of deliberate growth. It was slow, the bills still came in, and I made it work by spending less and doing the maintenance work I'd been putting off. That's the actual shape of running a small product business. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Customer reviews
Sarah M. — Fitzroy, VIC — 2024-03-14 — 5/5
Exactly what I was after
Ordered the Tasmanian Blackwood Cheese Board as a housewarming gift and it arrived in four days — well packaged and in perfect condition. The timber grain is genuinely beautiful, nothing like the flat boards you see in chain stores. My friend was very happy with it and I've already ordered one for myself.
Tom B. — New Farm, QLD — 2024-06-02 — 4/5
Solid product, minor delay
The Granite Wine Chiller is well made and works exactly as described — kept a bottle of white cold for over two hours at a summer barbecue. Delivery took a day longer than the estimate, but the packaging was very secure and nothing was damaged. Would order again.
Priya K. — Surry Hills, NSW — 2024-08-19 — 5/5
Great quality stone
The Marble and Jadeite Coasters Set looks even better in person than in the photos. Ordered on a Tuesday afternoon and had them by Thursday, which was faster than I expected for standard shipping. They're heavier than I thought, which is a good thing — they stay put on the coffee table.
James O. — Fremantle, WA — 2024-10-05 — 4/5
Nice piece, good communication
Bought the Kiwi Slate Platter for a dinner party and it got more comments than the food. Shipping to WA took six business days on standard, which is fair enough. Ian replied quickly when I had a question about sizing before I ordered, which I appreciated.
Lyn C. — Hobart, TAS — 2024-11-22 — 5/5
Beautifully made cheese board
I was a bit sceptical about ordering something like this online but the Tasmanian Blackwood Cheese Board arrived in immaculate condition. The wood has a real depth to it and it's clearly been finished properly. Fast delivery to Hobart too, which doesn't always happen with online orders.
Marcus D. — Brunswick, VIC — 2025-01-08 — 5/5
Opal holders are the real deal
The Opal Stone Candle Holders are genuinely striking — the colour variation in the stone is something you can't fake. Ordered two sets, both arrived well wrapped with no damage. Very straightforward checkout and tracking was updated promptly.
Rachel T. — Paddington, QLD — 2025-02-17 — 4/5
Good product, packaging could improve
The Marble and Jadeite Coasters Set is exactly as described and looks great on my dining table. One corner of the outer box was dented when it arrived, though the coasters inside were fine thanks to the inner foam wrap. Product itself is four stars easily — just flag the box handling to your courier.
Cate H. — Manly, NSW — 2025-04-03 — 5/5
Bought three items, all great
Ordered the Kiwi Slate Platter, the Granite Wine Chiller and the cheese board in one go for a birthday table setup. Everything arrived together in two days via express, packed securely. The slate platter is a good size for a proper spread — not too small like a lot of the ones you see online.
Shipping
All orders are packed and dispatched from our Byron Bay workshop. Standard orders are sent via Australia Post and typically arrive within 3–8 business days depending on where you are in Australia. Express orders go out with StarTrack and generally arrive within 1–3 business days for most metro and regional areas. Orders placed before 2pm AEST Monday to Friday are dispatched the same day. Orders placed after that cutoff or on weekends go out the next business day. You'll receive a tracking number by email as soon as your order has been collected. All prices on the site include GST.
Free standard shipping applies to all orders over $120 AUD. Below that threshold, shipping is calculated by weight and destination at checkout — no surprises at the end. Remote and rural addresses, including parts of WA, NT, and far north QLD, may sit toward the higher end of the delivery window. If you're in one of those areas and need something by a specific date, we'd recommend selecting express at checkout. We ship Australia-wide and do not currently offer international shipping.
Every order is packed carefully to handle the weight and fragility of stone and timber products. We use foam padding, kraft wrap, and reinforced outer boxes. If your order arrives damaged, take photos of the packaging and the item before doing anything else, then email us at hello@quarryridgeco.com.au within 48 hours of delivery. We'll arrange a replacement or refund promptly. Damage caused during transit is covered by us — you won't be out of pocket for something that wasn't your fault.
Returns
We want you to be happy with your purchase. If you change your mind, you can return most items within 30 days of the delivery date, provided they are unused, in their original condition, and returned with proof of purchase. Return postage for change-of-mind returns is at the customer's cost. Once we receive the item and confirm it meets the return conditions, we'll process your refund to the original payment method within 5–7 business days. We recommend using a tracked service for returns, as we can't accept responsibility for items lost in transit back to us.
Under the Australian Consumer Law, you are entitled to a remedy if a product is faulty, not fit for purpose, or does not match its description. In those cases, you do not need to return the item at your own expense and the 30-day window does not apply — your rights under Australian Consumer Law are separate from our standard return policy and cannot be excluded. If your item arrives faulty or damaged, contact us at hello@quarryridgeco.com.au with photos and your order number and we'll sort it out without delay.
A few things we can't accept returns on: custom or personalised orders, items that have been used or show signs of wear, and products where damage has occurred after delivery due to misuse or improper care. If you're unsure whether your situation qualifies, email us before sending anything back — we'd rather talk it through than have a parcel arrive that we can't process. Our team is based in Byron Bay and responds within 1–2 business days Monday to Friday.