Most entrepreneurs build one company. Josiah Lilly has built three — each one solving a different problem he kept running into in the stone and tile industry, while Epic Ceramic & Stone itself has stayed focused on doing one thing exceptionally well: installation.
Thirty-five years ago, that problem was installation quality. 20 years ago, it was material sourcing. More recently, it has been trade access to premium slab. Three different problems. Three different businesses — Epic Ceramic & Stone, Famosa Tile, and The Slab Studio. One underlying philosophy, applied at every stage a stone or tile project passes through.
Where It Started
Josiah Lilly’s career in stone and tile began with fabrication and installation — the physical, technical work of turning raw material into a finished surface. The early years were built the way most real businesses are built: one project, one relationship, one referral at a time.
The project that changed the trajectory of the company came from Steve O’Neill of O’Neill Development — one of Orange County’s most respected builders. It was Epic’s first major contract, and it did more than pay the bills. It put Epic’s work in front of the kind of builders, architects, and homeowners who talk to each other, who compare notes, and who do not hire a contractor twice if the first job wasn’t right.
We have never spent a dollar on advertising. Everything we have built has come from the work itself.
That referral-based growth model has defined Epic for three and a half decades. No advertising spend. No lead-gen funnel. Just work good enough that the person standing in the finished kitchen becomes the reason the next client calls.
Why Three Brands, Not One
Epic Ceramic & Stone solves the installation problem: turning a designer’s or homeowner’s material selection into a finished surface with precision, on a job site, at scale — from a single primary bath to a four-story travertine facade.
Famosa Tile solves a different problem entirely. Designers kept telling Josiah the same thing: showrooms were either sales floors dressed up as inspiration, or catalogs with no soul. Famosa was built, in Josiah’s words, as “the anti-tile store” — a fully functioning showroom in Costa Mesa where materials can actually be evaluated in context, not just sampled.
The Slab Studio solves a third problem: trade professionals in Southern California were sourcing premium slab either from outdoor yards with no climate control and no way to accurately judge color and veining, or from resources with no real commitment to protecting trade pricing. The Slab Studio in Santa Ana was built as an indoor, boutique, trade-only slab showroom — modeled on the experience of the world’s best stone houses, built for Southern California’s fabricators, designers, and tile professionals.
Though Josiah founded all three, each operates as its own independent business — its own team, its own day-to-day leadership, its own client relationships. Famosa Tile and The Slab Studio are not permitted to refer clients to Epic for installation; their focus stays on supporting the broader trade community of contractors, fabricators, and designers who rely on them, not on directing business back to their founder’s installation company.
The Thread That Connects All Three
Every decision across all three businesses traces back to the same principle: protect the client’s outcome, at every stage where that outcome could go wrong.
At Epic, that means employed, trained crews rather than subcontracted day labor, and a 12K-resolution digital slab scanner that lets a client see exactly how their material will look installed before a single cut is made. At Famosa, it means a showroom where every material is installed at full scale, in real light, because a 4-inch sample card cannot tell a designer what a 60-square-foot installation will actually look like. At The Slab Studio, it means sequential block tracking so a book-matched pair of slabs is guaranteed to actually match — and a pricing model that protects the trade professional’s margin on every transaction.
The material is one half of the equation. The process around it — the sourcing, the templating, the installation, the protection of the people specifying and installing it — is the other half. That’s the half most of the industry skips.
— Josiah Lilly
20 Years In
Three and a half decades is long enough to have lived through multiple material cycles, multiple economic cycles, and a complete transformation in how homes in Orange County are designed, built, and specified. It is also long enough to have built the kind of trust that shows up in an unusual way: in the past several years, Epic has completed the personal homes of a number of Orange County’s largest custom home builders, and the personal residences of several of the county’s most prominent architects — professionals who could choose any contractor in Southern California and chose Epic instead.
That is the real measure of 35 years. Not the number of projects completed, but the fact that the people who know the industry best keep bringing their own homes back.
| Epic Ceramic & Stone works with homeowners, general contractors, and interior designers across Orange County. Visit epicstone.net or follow @epicceramicandstone. |
Meta title: The Epic Difference: 20 Years, 3 Brands, One Vision
Meta Description: For 35 years, Josiah Lilly has built one philosophy across three independently-operated businesses. Here’s how Epic Ceramic & Stone, Famosa Tile, and The Slab Studio became Orange County’s most complete stone and tile ecosystem.
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