Exploring Life & Business with Price Latimer of Alkemis Paint

Today we’d like to introduce you to Price Latimer.

Price, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’ve always thought of business as a moveable sculpture, something you shape with your intellect, creativity, problem solving, step back from, and keep reworking / re-editing until it feels right.
My path has never been a straight line. I studied at RISD, Parsons and Brown, and further pursued my education in France, Mexico and New Zealand along the way. For more than 25 years, I’ve worked across fine art, interiors, creative direction, branding, hospitality and volunteering in museum stewardship, including serving on the Board of Trustees of the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now ICA LA) and the Board of Directors of the MOCA Contemporaries. I worked with the iconoclastic Italian furniture house Kartell, built a practice as an independent art advisor and curator, and later co-founded Pizzanista!, the cult restaurant brand born in the Arts District, growing it to multiple locations. Every chapter taught me the same thing in a different way, that the most interesting work happens when and where disciplines collide.
In June of 2020, I met Maya Crowne at a wellness retreat in the mountains of New Mexico. She had been trying to repaint her New York apartment and couldn’t find a paint that didn’t smell like a toxic chemistry experiment. She’d gone down a rabbit hole and shared some facts and figures with me. As health-conscious consumers, what we found down that rabbit hole was shocking. Roughly 95% of the world’s paint is plastic-based, and paint is the single largest source of microplastics in our oceans and waterways. We have all been shrink-wrapping our homes in liquid plastic and pretending that “low-VOC” means healthy. So we spent three and a half years in research and development with chemists, engineers and feasibility experts, and in 2023 we launched Alkemis: the world’s first wellness paint, made from crushed rocks and crystals, with artist-quality mineral pigments. Rock, not plastic.
Since then we’ve painted museum walls, galleries, art fairs, hotels, restaurants, showrooms and homes, and continue to grow exponentially thanks to our wonderful B2B and DIY clientele. Alkemis is Cradle to Cradle Certified®, women-owned, made in the USA, certified by Parsons Healthy Materials Lab, and contributes toward LEED Certification Points, WELL Building Standard Points, the Living Building Challenge, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I don’t think I know any entrepreneur who has traversed a smooth path! A bumpy road is par for the course and an integral part of the journey.
Greenwashing is so pervasive that most people sincerely believe “low-VOC” means non-toxic. It doesn’t. VOCs are not a measure of what a product does to human health and the environment, and conventional paints are often full of carcinogens, PFAs, plasticizers, flame retardants, biocides, fungicides and synthetic pigments. So before we could sell anything, we had to educate ourselves as well as others: designers, architects, contractors, homeowners. You can’t upend a category that people don’t realize is broken.
Building a premium, hand-crafted product at scale also means our supply chain and operations are only as strong as the weakest link. Tariffs and inflation are testing every American manufacturer, and we’re no exception. But here’s the irony: latex and acrylic paints, along with their binders, solvents and often their pigments, are petrochemical derivatives, so their price will always rise and fall with the price of oil. We can’t promise we’re immune to a world in flux. But we can promise that our raw materials are ethically and sustainably sourced from non-petrochemical sources and that we’ve chosen a different path.

And then there’s the obvious, unglamorous truth of being a founder: 80-to-100-hour weeks, a team spread across time zones, and the constant endeavor of protecting your own well-being while selling a wellness product. Despite all of that, we are extremely passionate about what we do and truly believe that making these types of intentional choices in our daily lives and in our built environment can percolate out into the world in the form of positive change.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Alkemis Paint?
Alkemis is the world’s first wellness paint, an all-natural, premium interior mineral paint that brings nature and design together to create healthier, more intentional spaces.
The fundamental difference is the binder. Conventional paint uses polymers (plastics) synthesized from crude oil. Alkemis uses sustainable raw materials and clear quartz as its foundation, with proprietary mixes of the same earthen pigments (ochres and oxides) artists have used since the first human handprint on a cave wall. Because nothing synthetic dulls those pigments, the color has an incomparable depth and luminosity. Our velvet matte finish has a microcrystalline surface that shifts with the light throughout the day, so the wall becomes like a living surface than a coating.
It’s also simply better engineered. Mineral paint is vapor-permeable and naturally high in pH, which makes mold growth virtually impossible without fungicides. It’s UV-stable, Class A fire-resistant (rock doesn’t burn), doesn’t off-gas, and lasts 20+ years, roughly double conventional acrylic. We always ask: would you rather paint your walls with plastic or rock?
I think what also sets us apart is that we try not to behave like a paint company. We market Alkemis more like an art project or fashion brand, because color is cultural collateral. Our palette is organized into Elemental Collections (Earth, Water, Air and Fire), a nod to the alchemy our name comes from. The color names are irreverent, literary, astronomical, mystical, geographical, and occasionally ridiculous (we try to have fun and not take ourselves too seriously!)
What I want readers to know: your walls are the largest surface in your home, and the most intimate one. You sleep beside them, raise children and pets inside them, and breathe whatever they release. We encourage people to buy better, buy less, swap synthetics for earthen materials, and bring nature indoors. Together, we can raise the vibration of our home planet by starting with our four walls.

What were you like growing up?
I like to think that anybody who has known me for a long time will tell you that I have always been fiercely independent and fiercely been myself. I grew up in the Texas Panhandle, a stunning environment if you look past the perceived flatness of the Great Plains. I didn’t realize it then, but I was being raised inside a perfect mineral color palette of sedimentary and alluvial rock formations: striated layers of red, sienna, umber, lavender and cream.
I was an active, adventurous, curious, adrenaline-seeking, endlessly-creating kid: drawing, daydreaming, dancing, playing dress up, building forts, obsessed with music… fully at home in the most cosmopolitan environment and at the top of a 15,000 foot peak. I have always been deeply connected to all the animal friends (and have been vegetarian for nearly 35 years). I’m a deeply impassioned nature and ocean advocate and a devoted scuba diver, which makes the microplastics problem even more seriously poignant and pressing. I’ve always been an amalgamator, who sees the connection between the art museum, the music studio, the open road, the far-flung exotic locale, the desert floor and the ocean floor and wants to bring them all into the same room for a killer dinner party.

Pricing:

• Alkemis Premium Interior Mineral Paint: $135 per gallon

Contact Info:

• Website: https://alkemispaint.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alkemispaint/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alkemispaint/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alkemis-paint
• Other: https://www.pinterest.com/alkemispaint/

Image Credits
Tyler Whiteside, USM, Jeanne Canto, Logan Jackson, We Are Contents/Gallery FUMI, Joe Kramm, AIPAD, House of Honey, Magdalena Wosinska