We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sam Schumacher a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sam thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Well, I started the way most glassblowers start; studying Political Communications. I had one elective credit to fill my senior year and was able to take a glassblowing class at MassArt through a consortium. I was immediately obsessed with the process. I spent about 6 months after college working in communications, but quickly realized the glass studio was where I wanted to be.

I began apprenticing with Lee Miltier and others in a funky bohemian glass studio in Berkeley, where I met a lot of folks making it as glassblowers and designers. I soaked up as much as I could. After a couple years, a group of us turned the studio into a Co-op and eventually I branched off and built my own studio.

I launched my business with a Kickstarter campaign that took over my life for a while, but gave me enough start up cash to get things going. I had way too many rewards and options that turned into a huge logistical nightmare, but I learned a lot of lessons about how to set up my production and shipping flows. I made a lot of connections through it and eventually started getting folks reaching out for bigger wholesale orders and custom work. Over the last twelve years, things just sort of built up gradually.

I’m at a point now where I feel like I’ve outgrown some of my original designs and concepts and am gearing up for a sort of re-launch of my product line.

Sam, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My business, Rocket Glass Works is a small batch producer of glass tableware, lighting and sculpture. I have a product line of mostly tableware that I sell through my website and at retail shows. That’s about half of my business. The other half is custom work for private collectors, restaurants and hotels. This ranges from sculpture installations, to large batches of cocktail glasses to custom lighting.

Every piece I make is hand-shaped, one at a time in a small glassblowing studio. We melt a furnace full of glass and draw the glass out on steel pipes. It’s usually a team effort with 2-5 people working on each piece. Generally, the bigger or more complicated a piece is, the more people we need working on it. Things move quickly in a glass shop and I’m very fortunate to work with a team of incredibly talented glassmakers. This is the core of the business to me. I love the process and working with the team to solve problems and produce beautiful work.

I’m in the middle of building out a new product line right now. I have built a group of designs that I’m really proud of, but it has been a real challenge editing and selecting what to include. I’m trying my best to remember the lessons of the Kickstarter campaign I launched twelve years ago where I ended up offering way too many options and designs and got overwhelmed by all the logistics.

Of course, my business is in a very different stage these days and I’m able to handle the production and shipping a lot better, but still, I’m wary of building a line with too much complexity and too many options, so I’m trying to land on a happy medium.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

One of my favorite and biggest projects over the years was working for an incredible chef and restaurateur in San Francisco. It was a great lesson in saying yes to whatever project comes your way, even if it sounds crazy. I was about four years into running the business, so I was still pretty green. A job request came my way through my website to make a series of large wine bottles for a chef who wanted to use them for a photo shoot for a cookbook he was writing. I thought it sounded simple enough, but when I talked to him, it turned out he wanted me to seal whole chickens inside the bottles with vegetable and red wine as a sculptural representation of the classic French dish, Coq au Vin. I was a bit confused and concerned, but I said yes and did it.

When the job was complete, he told me he was gearing up to open a high end restaurant focused on the intersection of art and food and asked me to make some glassware for it. I was thrilled and said yes even though it was a huge order of 400 stemmed wine glasses and I had never had an order anywhere near that size.

It turned into an incredible relationship, and I ended up working with him for many years after that, making thousands of pieces of custom drinkware, food service dishes, almost all of the lighting for the restaurant as well as several custom sculpture installations.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

I built out an e-commerce platform on my own website. I definitely considered using a third party site at first, but ultimately decided that I wanted to fully control the way my products were listed and sold. It has worked pretty well for me, although my whole website is in need of a refresh, which is part of my upcoming re-launch.

I wanted everything to be on the same site, since I get a lot of my commission work through there, it just felt better to have everything in one place to give my clients a more holistic picture of my business. Like if someone is on my site looking for custom sculpture or lighting, I like that all of my product line is also right there for them to see.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Www.RocketGlassWorks.com
• Instagram: @rocketglassworks