So, back to the tariffs. While our first agreement was that they are cruel and stupid, the nuanced conversation needs to be had: are Americans aware of how their constant hunger for lower lower lower prices is devastating industries, neighbors, communities?

And that’s how it’s gone. In the past couple years, the entire borosilicate functional glass industry has crumbled; our color manufacturers have stopped production, laid off workers, our materials suppliers can’t afford to keep raw glass in stock. Top down, bottom up. An entire industry is folding.

Meanwhile, there’s a crush of imported closer-copies of our designs just flooding onto Etsy and the American market, being sold at far below what it would cost us to produce them. The guy in Canada told him this would happen- they would crush us by selling cheap, then take over once we were gone.

I tell you this story to illustrate the mindset of the greed-class; instead of offering us more money, instead of working with us to slow the workload, they went to China, had near-replicas made, and overtook our niche (and the burgeoning ‘weed fashion’ industry ate it up.

We contacted the owner and expressed our feeling of hurt and betrayal at this situation.

Then, a couple months later, they are now marketing a new set of fruit pipes, with tiny slight differences, that we traced back to a manufacturer in China, being sold wholesale for 1/3 of our already low price

Then we get a message through Etsy from their new buyer, asking if we would be interested in making a custom line for them. (Excuse me? We already make a custom line for you??) It was clear she reached out to us because she saw the fruit pipes, thought we were a different artist, and go around us.

After about a year of producing an ongoing line for them (that we thought was going to be a limited edition) at roughly what we would charge for our usual wholesale (marked up 400% roughly) their production demands were unbearable and we explained we had to also focus on our other markets as well.

That’s was all really exciting- from the taboo shadows of the art world to being accepted into a major department store by the shoes section, we were thrilled to finally break that glass-ceiling of being actually recognized as art, as a skilled craft, as a legitimate product.

A little side story: about 2019 we were approached by a ‘fashion brand’ Edie Parker from NYC about making a custom line of fruit pipes for them, with our designs in special colors. There was an article about them in Forbes, they were listed in the Playboy gift guide, and were sold in Barney’s in LA.

We were pretty successful, though. We had built strong ‘brand loyalty’ on IG, had numerous wholesalers, and were in the top 1% of sellers on Etsy until about 2021, when Etsy stopped caring about ‘handmade by the artist’ and Meta started shadow banning any form of functional glass art posters.

Over the next decade, blowers continued to innovate, and cheap imported copies flooded the market. It got to the point where blowers were afraid to put out new designs, because it was just feeding the machine. But, they kept growing, trying, lowering their prices, going out of business.