We recently connected with Eddie Bernard and have shared our conversation below.

Eddie, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Would you say you are more focused on growing revenue or cutting costs? We’d love to hear how you think about these two critical drivers

We tend to spend more time on cutting costs through design and process improvement. It has been difficult to grow our workforce over the years primarily due to the relationship between the skill sets we need and the sparsely populated area in which our business is located. One example is how we use slots and tabs to help assemble metal parts together. This minimizes human error by helping to assure the parts will only fit correctly where they fit at all.

Eddie, 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?

I was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, where I had full access to my dad’s woodworking machinery since I was a child and began building objects of my own design around the age of 8 or 9. These would have been things like skateboard ramps or doghouses, but my understanding of the processes came from working on carpentry projects with my dad and uncle(s) during the years prior. My mother’s pottery / ceramic art practice also must have inspired me, as I remember helping her stack bricks to build a sawdust-fired kiln around age 8 as well. I started working at a stained glass shop at age 15 and went off to college to study glass art at RIT in Rochester, NY after making my first blown glass object in my senior year in high school while assisting my mentor Paulo Dufour as he taught glassblowing classes in New Orleans. In my third year of college, I build a small glass melting furnace and began to learn how to assemble the gas piping and troubleshoot and update the electric heating and safety systems on the school’s furnaces. For this I was given a scholarship and award by the school, and I became really interested in continuing to learn about kiln and furnace design. During my last year of college I started my business, Wet Dog Glass by signing up for a credit card and buying some business cards. At that time the glass art industry was much smaller than it is today, and for the most part artists built their own furnaces. Over the years, we have grown alongside the industry, innovating to improve energy efficiency and reliability of the equipment as well as to educate technicians on their operation and maintenance and to work with engineers and architects to design studio spaces and ventilation systems. It makes me proud to look back over the past 27 years and see the cumulative influence we have had on glass studio equipment design and operation. I’m also proud of our internship program through which we typically have one college student per summer or winter break who works hand in hand with our production crew on the shop floor to gain exposure to the behind-the-scenes work of the glass art movement. This is a paid internship, with housing paid for, and we do it that way in effort to avoid blocking access by those students who could otherwise not afford to take the opportunity.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

We were operating quite successfully in New Orleans, LA when the federal levees failed and flooded the city following Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge. Our shop flooded, and we had no electricity for eight months, so we (my wife and I) ended up having to let our coworkers go. We decided to take the opportunity to experience major change and contribute to the rebuilding of the city. Over the next 2.5 years we would work to gut and completely renovate 5 houses in New Orleans. Much of this work was done using power from a generator. To stay afloat financially, I travelled to universities to build furnaces with workforces made of the students and with materials drop-shipped to the location. Those years were difficult but adventurous, and eventually we decided to move to North Carolina to build a new team with a focus on energy efficiency. I had done a lot of research while we were shut down which helped me develop new design features that would reduce heat loss and thereby help our clientele stay afloat by reducing energy costs. There were a number of innovations that contributed to the whole. Ultimately our competitors had to follow suit to compete, and voila—we changed the status quo. Long story short, we pivoted through one of the worst man-made/natural disasters ever to hit the United States, and we came out of it with renewed vigor and passion informed by the effects of climate change, flawed civil engineering, and system neglect (ie, the disaster.)

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

In March 2008 we decided to rebuild our team to take advantage of a really big project that would help us afford to get back on our feet. It was a huge risk, but would pay off if we succeeded in landing the job. The client was essentially the State of Pennsylvania, and the price tag was $600,000. It would be our biggest project to date. The most glaring problem was that state projects don’t pay up front, and we’d have to borrow money to do the work. In September 2008, just prior to landing the contract, the global financial crisis occurred, which would make it difficult to borrow money. To make matters worse, our CPA informed us that we would have to come up with $97,000 to spend on machinery or pay it in taxes. Now we would have to borrow both for the project plus the machinery or to pay taxes in the midst of a global financial crisis. All we wanted was to be back in business, yet life kept happening to us! Fortunately, while no publically-held banks would lend to us despite our state-backed contract, a small, local, privately held bank took a chance on us. That gained our business for the foreseeable future, and we frequently reject solicitation by bigger banks. We completed that project on time, paid back the money, and have used that bank for large loans ever since.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wdg-us.com
• Instagram: @wdg_us

Image Credits
Eddie Bernard