From 2010 through last year, a severe drought gripped California. Aquifers dried up, agriculture suffered, and, according to the U.S. Forest Service, over 100 million trees shriveled and died across 7.7 million acres of the state’s forests. Without a consistent supply of moisture, California’s majestic pine trees began to dry up from the inside out. Parched trees are especially vulnerable to invasion from mountain beetles, which burrow into the bark, lay eggs, and eventually eat their way through the bark, blocking the circulation of water and nutrients around the tree.
In early 2017, Lupien and Schabacker, who met while working for an environmental nonprofit before beginning graduate school, founded SapphirePine to prove the value of the drought-killed trees. They reached out to private landowners and excavators who were working to harvest and remove dead trees from properties in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and asked if they could source wood from them to turn into furniture. So far, the SapphirePine team has custom-built around a dozen pieces of furniture to fill word-of-mouth orders, and have launched a Kickstarter to expand its Oakland-based operations.
“One of the silver linings around this tragedy is that these California trees are huge,” Schabacker says. Where he grew up in Colorado, pines reach only around 10 inches in diameter; a table made from Colorado pine would take several slabs of wood to complete. “But here in California, you have Ponderosa pines that are three or four feet in diameter,” he says. SapphirePine furniture centers around single-slab design, taken from the cross-section of a single dead tree. “Someone can literally sit at a dining room table and count the rings of the tree to figure out how old it was,” Schabacker says.
For months before they incorporated as SapphirePine, Lupien and Schabacker worked with mentors at U.C. Berkeley’s businesses and design schools to build out a market strategy plan. For the time being, they’re fielding orders online, but coordinating with gallery spaces in the East Bay to set up small-scale displays. The Kickstarter funds will enable them to buy a truck to make local deliveries from their Oakland-based shop, and source more wood and tools to speed up turnaround time on the furniture.
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