About
We started by washing things.
In 1984, HORIE Metal opened in Tsubame-Sanjo with one machine we built ourselves — a washer for stainless kitchen equipment. Two years later we added gold and silver plating. We were a small shop learning what metals do.
1988
Titanium came to us.
An engineer from NKK — then one of Japan's largest steelmakers — came to our shop with a question: could we form a cylinder out of titanium sheet?
We said yes, right away.
He didn't take it well. His team had spent years and a budget on it and concluded it couldn't be done. Titanium is difficult. Everyone knows that. And here was a small shop in Niigata saying it was no trouble. He left.
They had been working it out on paper. We just went to the floor and tried it. By the time he was back in Tokyo that afternoon, the cylinder existed.
NKK commissioned the development, and that is how our titanium work began — forming it, and then learning to color it.
We didn't go looking for this material. It found us.
Thirty-eight years later, a single cylinder is the easy part. A double-wall tumbler is two of them, sealed together, with a rim welded thin enough to drink from.
What we learned to do with it
Titanium resists corrosion. It doesn't react with skin or with what you drink. And under the right current, it grows an oxide layer that shows color — not paint, but light interfering in the metal itself.
We brought titanium coloring to market in 1992. Then cookware, outdoor gear, motorcycle parts, jewelry, drinkware. Each one taught us something about how far the metal will go.
Somewhere along the way we found the kiln.At 1931°F, titanium's crystal structure grows large enough to see. We learned to control how large. That is where our tumblers come from.
Europe
Our coloring is on three public works in Europe — a 250-metre sculpture in London, a residential tower in Paris, and an 18-metre phoenix in the Netherlands.
Alabama, 2019
At TITANIUM USA 2019, our chairman Takuji Horie received the Titanium Applications Development Award from the International Titanium Association — recognition for twenty years of work in the field.
Today
Thirty people in Tsubame-Sanjo, Niigata. We make every tumbler here.
Whatever we build, the question is the same one we asked in 1988: what is this material actually good for? A product is only worth making if it lets the metal be what it is.