Three Cochrane area businessmen are shining light on a rare gemstone by showcasing it to a mainstream crowd.
It was only last month that Scott Wagner, Scott Winograd and David Smith opened the retail location for Empire Ammolite in Bankers Hall, downtown Calgary, but they are confident that the beautiful, colourful gemstone will catch on quickly to a larger demographic.
“One of the things we are trying to do by opening a store in Bankers Hall is introduce Calgary to ammolite,” said Wagner, standing in the team’s production facility located on his rural property off Highway 22, just south of the Highway 1 overpass.
This is the first ammolite store in Calgary. While there are shops in Canmore and Banff that sell the gem, there is only one other dedicate ammolite store, Canmore’s Ammonite Factory.
Wagner started up Empire after working with Richard Morgan from the Ammonite Factory.
Wagner holds up some brilliant gemstones, demonstrating their remarkable colour-shifting properties under the light that come in a variety of colours, intensified when they come into contact with water.
On a scale of rarity that relates to affordability, the reds and greens are more common, then yellows and orange, then blues and purples and finally pink. Gemstones can range from the low hundreds to the tens of thousands, as can the artwork or fossils.
“If you have a piece with pink in it, it usually has all the other colours,” smiled Winograd, while showcasing a bright gemstone with glittering greens and reds.
Ammonite are fossils of prehistoric snail-like sea creatures that went extinct along with dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic era, which were mostly comprised of aragonite.
Although it can be found across the world, the only gemstone-quality ammonite that contains the eye-catching colours, known as ammolite, is found in Alberta – across the province and primarily along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
This makes the gemstone very unique and with a short window of a mining season, when the ground is thawed but not too hot out, and only a handful of productive mines in the province - the gemstone is becoming even more rare.
Winograd explains that among First Nations people, the gemstone is used both ceremonially and as jewelry and is known as “Buffalo Stone.” Much mining has taken place on Blood Nation land since Alberta-based mining company Korite began mining in 1967.
But the biggest market has been among Asian buyers for its feng shui properties and purposes.
“It’s a feng shui stone – it’s been blessed as feng shui. It’s also the newest gemstone,” explained Wagner. “I think this industry is on the cusp of going somewhere ... it’s just starting to become quite popular in Asia.”
“Probably 50 per cent of our customer base are from Asia, buying it for feng shui,” added Winograd.
A feng shui concept inspired the retail store gallery-style design of Empire Ammolite, where staff are on the floor to lead customers through an educational experience in a peaceful, quiet, cool and highly visual setting.
Mined from the team’s Bassano-area mine, the venture began roughly one year ago.
Smith, with a background in strategic business development and coaching, is president of the mining business for Empire.
“Mining is much more than shovelling in the ground,” he said, explaining that the layers of regulation, such as the Historical Resources Act and Health and Safety Act, has him spending a great deal of time buried in paperwork to ensure compliance is met.
As well, once discovered, photographs of all fossils must be taken and sent to the Royal Tyrrell Museum before they can be mined for gemstone purposes.
Once fossils are safely extracted and brought to their production facility, they go through a careful process of being cleaned, chiselling the matrix (stone formations) off until the craftsmen see what is left to work with.
It is then graded as a fossil, art piece or gemstone and then refined by their in-house jewelers and goldsmiths. Empire Ammolite employs 15 people.
It’s been a busy year for the trio, given that Empire’s CEO Wagner and Winograd, president of distribution and retail, also took a stab at vying for the Banff-Kananaskis UCP seat earlier this year.
Winograd also made headlines last year when he closed his high-end restaurant the Bears Den in nearby Bearspaw in 2018.
There are plans to expand their mining, production and distribution, as well as retail operations.
Visit empireammolite.com to learn more or check out their Facebook page.
