@crotger suggests that perhaps using a dropdown that allows picking sub-items (stone then marble, granite, etc.) might be more elegant than the boxes. I wonder if this may be adding too much labor for a refinement. Need to include @sdigiulio to work through refinements for search.
scott comment:
I do think that having the visual aspect of the hierarchy and subitems would be useful as the system stands, even though one logically knows that marble [stone.marble] is a type of stone, it's not necessarily obvious that the one is a subcategory of the other in our scheme. This would be especially good for things like writing, where there are a bunch of subordinate categories, the relations between which are not terribly transparent unless you know the system. Though if it is too much labor, we can think around it a bit and see what kind of solution works best.