PRONIK SPECIMENS was founded by me, Prodromos Nikolaidis, a professional geologist who in heart simply remains a mineral specimen aficionado.
The idea of making mineral specimens available for purchase to collectors started floating around sometime during the course of my undergraduate studies. At that time, frequent university field trips to mines and solo prospecting hikes resulted in large volumes of mineral specimens to start piling up. However, the limited home space dictated that only a small percentage of those specimens could find their way into my personal collection. The rest would either have to be stored and forgotten or discarded. Neither of these options sounded right as there were specimens simply too good to have such a fate. Well then, another solution had to be found – what if other people were interested in acquiring these minerals for their own collection?
Fast forward a couple of years to the end of my undergraduate studies and there’s finally some free time to think about creating some sort of mineral business. PRONIK SPECIMENS materialized for the first time as its own entity on 7th Sep 2017 when an account was created on e-rocks.com and the first sale happened about a month later on 9th Oct 2017. PRONIK SPECIMENS existed here and there (e.g., e-rocks.com, ebay.com, YouTube, facebook, instagram) but it didn’t have any official existing place. Until 1st Aug 2023 when this very website was created.
The primary goal of this website is to have listed at any time all the available for purchase specimens. At the beginning, all of the available specimens were personally collected in the field. However, this has changed over time and now there are also choice specimens available acquired from other fellow field collectors and dealers. One purpose of the website’s Blog page is to record how some of the available specimens came to be and give some nice trivia and background information.
Thanks for your interest in learning a bit more about me and PRONIK SPECIMENS! It’s always a great pleasure to engage in discussions with like-minded mineral-people so feel absolutely free to drop a line at any time and for any topic!
Sincerely,
Prodromos