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

Flannery, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

This is a silly story! I was trying to come up with a name for my company that wasn’t specific to any particular industry. While I was starting this particular journey as a stained glass studio, I wanted to be able to branch out in any direction under the same moniker. So I ended up landing on Friend of All as an homage to my older brother Dakota. Who was my really pushing me to get back to my creative roots. I remembered that growing up we were always told that his name translates to “friend of all” so I thought, “that’s nice! I will go with that!”. It wasn’t until after I’d established an LLC, made a website and ordered hundreds of business cards that my mother pointed out his name actually translates to friend TO all, not friend OF all!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I first started working with stained glass about ten years ago and I was immediately hooked! I purchased all the necessary tools and dedicated my nights and weekends to this new obsession. About a year later, we lost the beautiful sun filled apartment we’d been living in and moved to a cute little railroad apartment. We felt pretty lucky because it was rent stabilized, which is like winning the lottery in NY, but it was extremely dark. Like – zero sunlight, all our plants died – dark! So I started making these little cheerful lamps to put up all over the house. I was honestly a little shocked to see how effective they were. In an instant our home went from a depressing dark little box to a cozy, nurturing sanctuary. I thought “Wow, I might be onto something here!”

From there things progressed fairly quickly. I started the tradeshow/craft fair circuit, then eventually quit my full time job and slowly built an impressive team of creative people who now make up my company. Each and every lamp we make is still handmade by a small crew in Brooklyn. We do wholesale, retails, custom work as well as teach monthly classes to the community.

We feel so lucky to have survived the pandemic (so far) and to still have such a supportive network of clients and customers out there!

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

I feel like we have had many “near death” moments for this business. We totally slipped through the cracks of the Covid Relief Fund and somehow did not qualify for any of the PPP Grant Funds. So its been alot of scraping by. Then once we seemingly bounced back the inflation cause our margins to completely disappear, so we were operating at a break even status for awhile there. Its just a constant, never ending pivot. You solve one problem and the next is soon behind, but I feel compelled to keep going as long as there are still orders coming in. Still interested customers discovering us. And so far, that element has remained!

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

We still do all the manufacturing of any stained glass element in house, but I do have my lamp bases made by a local CNC company. They are so heavy when ordered in bulk so I only work with companies near enough to eliminate the shipping cost. I also collaborate with metal workers and woodworkers for my large scale projects.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.friend-of-all.com
• Instagram: @friendofallglass