WHATCHAOUGHTADO - Why don’t you make X ware in my Y preferred color?

Back in the day, we made everything in every single color all the time. As you can imagine, that’s a lot of making - and a lot of product - to manage. It made sense when we were primarily wholesalers to other retailers – it allowed them to select the colors or the designs and colors that they most preferred for their customers. (One of our favorite pieces of Blenko lore is about a wholesaler’s distaste for Chartreuse. An influential salesman said that his customers would never purchase Chartreuse, but Winslow Anderson stuck to his guns – and it was one of the year’s bestsellers.)

But in our heydey, in the 50s and 60s, we had dozens of shops working over three shifts — we’re a much smaller, tighter company now, and growing still, but lack that capacity and through-put. So when we release new wares and designs, or swing into our holidays and seasons again, we’ve had to become more choosy about what we offer in what colors.

We always try to maintain a catalog of continuing, classic wares that we offer in as many solid colors as we can - like our classic 418 dimpled tumblers.

But for small release drops, we try to select colors and palettes that suit the forms, or the season, or create a vibe. We can’t stretch ourselves too thin!

We wish we could satisfy all your color requests but the time and material it takes to change colors means we do so only periodically and deeply intentionally. Generally speaking, we have waited until the end of the year to introduce new colors or retire line colors.

It’s our hope to develop some more flexibility and nimbleness in batching color(s) in the coming months and years – we’re hard at work on new furnace construction and old furnace reconstruction! This will mean new colors coming online in the middle of the year this year – so keep your eyes on our social media for news!