Why are you auctioning these beautiful pieces? Why can’t I just buy one, or why aren’t there more?

We see you in the comments section of our recent auctions wondering why we can’t just make all of our pieces available to all of our customers all of the time. The first answer resides in the frequency with which we just typed “all.”

Let’s start there. There’s no good way to reach all of our customers at the same time. You all check our website, or our social media feed, at different times of the day - so unless we have a single time or day to orient all of our customers to with regards to any/all new product, there is no good way to let you know when we are introducing a new, or limited, product – at least not in a sufficient manner to allow everyone an equal opportunity to purchase the piece.

Because the problem is, from there - let’s say we had ten pieces of a Widget vase in Cobalt. We list those ten pieces online. In order to make sure everyone is aware of the piece that might want a crack at buying it, then we publish that we are releasing the product at 9am on Tuesday. When 9am on Tuesday rolls around, there will be more people trying to buy the product than there are products. The ten sell out in less than a minute – and then for the rest of the day, maybe even week, we field comments and phone calls complaining about the process by which those ten Widgets were sold. The ten people who bought them were happy, but the far larger number of people who wanted to be able to buy them are unhappy.

Auctions really are the best way we know to make unreproducible, limited, special, one-of-a-kind pieces available to as many people as possible in the fairest manner possible. Sure – I hear the rebuttal in the comments now – that drives the price of these things up so that no one else can afford them, or the people “who really want them” can’t afford them.

We hear you – but maybe the point should be that when we make art – and not just tableware that can be reproduced in quantity – it should have a higher price point. These pieces are one-of-a-kind, the result of some fluke - intentional or unintentional - and there aren’t more like it out in the world. So it doesn’t make any kind of economic sense, or even cultural sense, to let them go at base-level ware prices. When someone worked additional time to craft a special piece to make available to You (the collective you of our customer base) - then it should be worth what it is worth to the people who really want it.

It’s a fact that as a production glass facility, we produce pieces – prototypes, or samples, or mistakes (happy or otherwise) - that don’t fit into our stocking and pricing categories. There are things that we can’t make more of, because in making the few we do have, we learned that we cannot. It’s not some willful perversity on our end that keeps us from offering you more of the things you fall in love with! Would that we could make 1000s of the Very Special pieces you fall in love with – but we’ve done the math, we know our limits, and we know we cannot.

So what ends up on auction? Very Special Pieces. These are the pieces we can’t reproduce - because they’re in a color or colorway we can’t achieve again, or because they were crafted during a lunch break, or because we tried to make them for everybody and figured out during the process that we could not. They’re there so that everyone can see them because we’re proud of them. We made something cool, and special - and we know a lot of people would like to see them, and maybe even, if they’re successful, own it themselves.