Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Barry Stevens. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Barry, thanks for joining us today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?
I’ve been blowing glass full time as an individual business owner for 18 years. I started working with glass basically fresh out of high school. Being a business owner is often misunderstood in my opinion. The adage “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is completely false. I do what I love, and I do love blowing glass. However, if you want to make a living doing something you love, especially if its art, you work EVERY day of your life. I had some circumstances that made me have to get a regular job for a little while a few years back, and only working 40 hours a week was a breeze. I had plenty of free time and a lot less stress. However, I didn’t like what I was doing, and only working for a paycheck felt very unfulfilling. So as soon as I was able to go back to blowing glass full time, working 7 days a week and often 50-60 hours a week, I couldn’t wait. You work harder for the same amount of money most times, but at least working for yourself everything you do benefits you. You put in the extra work because its an investment in yourself, instead of an investment in someone else. In the end, a regular job would be easier, but I know I would never be as happy doing it.
Barry, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My name is Barry Stevens, I’m the owner of Vulcan Glass Art Studio in Buena Vista Colorado. I’ve been blowing glass full time for 18 years, and I specialize in production glass. The glass pipe industry is a multimillion dollar industry with many different facets. Some artist provide high art pipes that sell for thousands, but I have always specialized in high quality but affordable production pipework. My bread and butter are pieces that retail for $50 or less. Our industry has a lot of foreign competition from china and India, so I have set myself up with a reasonably competitively priced catalog of American made products. Our studio provides a safe and secure work environment and allows for the training and employment of dedicated production artists. I’ve begun using the studio as a way to help others escape the 9-5 grind.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Resilience has actually been the name of the game from Day 1. Vulcan Glass Art Studio began as a business in 2008 in the depths of the recession. I started the studio in my garage and did door to door sales in downtown Chicago for the first 8 years of my career. During that time, I was making minimum wage if i was lucky, and trying to compete with mass produced work from china because most shop owners weren’t making enough money to pay American prices. So I would take the hit necessary to keep the lights on and the torches light. It took several years of grinding out mass production for the shops to start to recover and my nicer work to start to sell. That time in my career taught me that while its always nice to make the products you want, sometimes its more important to make the products you can sell. Now that our industry is facing another massive downturn, those lessons are coming in handy again as we navigate the future as a studio.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
Vulcan Glass Art Studio is first and foremost a production company. I apprenticed under a glassblower for a year, and then struck out on my own. In the beginning, I knew how to make maybe 2-3 decent products. As I went about trying to sell my work it was quickly apparent that even if a shop liked those products, they could only purchase 20-30 of any 1 product at a time. This lead to a rapid learning process where I had to design and teach myself new designs. In the first year I went from that 2-3 products to over 30 products. Now, 18 years later, our studio produces over 100 different pipes and are working towards being a one stop shop for any pipe shop in the US.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.vulcanglassart.com
- Instagram: vulcanglassart
- Facebook: Vulcan Glass Art Studio