Beginning his career with a masonry company in 1988, Marco Duran took a great liking to creating timeless solid structures which led him to an apprenticeship with a Master Stone Setter. After several years, his mentor retired and took back to his roots in Italy, thus allowing Duran to embark on his entrepreneur passion in a career specializing in stone setting and fabricating. Within the next 10 years, he honed his skills and had set an ambitious course to open a fabrication shop. In 2001, with minimal funds and heaps of aspiration and desire, he opened Atlas Marble and Granite.
Life began for Atlas Marble and Granite in a moderately sized 7,500-square-foot building in Newark, NJ. The space was a bare cinder block box which Duran began outfitting with basic first-level stone equipment, a used bridge saw and a couple of worktables and hand tools. While remaining in the same building today, Atlas has doubled its workable space to a 15,000-square-foot facility, and most importantly, advanced to a fully digitized operation.