Helios Pause

Happy Summer! It’s been a busy year at Blenko – and we’ll confess, we were caught a little on our back foot by how popular our new releases have been! Our Starry Night 384, our Helios series, our collaboration with Don Pendleton – each of these releases exceeded our wildest expectations. And we mean that literally – we didn’t quite know how to plan for the huge enthusiasm these wares would spark. We are, however, overjoyed – naturally.

This boon is a blessing, but comes with its own challenges; what we initially sketched as a five-year plan for infrastructural upgrades to our 1930s factory is looking more like a two-year plan thanks to your patronage!

We’re doing our best to catch up with orders. We hope you’ve received some communication from us by now if you’re still waiting on one of our big-demand pieces. If you haven’t, we apologize: there’s been a lot going on!

We’re also taking this moment to take a breather and reorient our production scheduling. We’re doubling down on catching up! Accordingly, our pause on the Helios Water Bottle Series will, for now, be indefinite. Don’t you worry - they will return! But we can’t right now pin down the date; we hope you’ll understand.

For those who have been following our saga, we have some exciting updates to our campus!
We have three NEW tank furnaces coming online in the next week or two. These new furnaces have been in the works for almost three years and are custom built specifically for Blenko!

In addition, we are in the process of purchasing four brand new furnaces which should give us an extra TWO TONS of glass capacity! These are slated for delivery sometime at the end of quarter four and we couldn’t be more excited.

Not only will these new furnaces increase our glass capacity, we expect them to increase our glass QUALITY exponentially!

Speaking of quality, we are in the process of retiring our old annealing lehr and replacing it with a brand new annealer. This will result in a much more efficient (and faster!) annealing process.
Our annealing time will go from > five hours down to less than two hours!

Big changes are one thing, but the small ones are great, too – like a new wet saw for Grinding that cuts hurricane shades like butter, or the overhaul of the aging Design Studio to host meetings and a fully functional photography studio. Small things like new storage shelving in our Gift Shop have huge impacts for our employees and customers alike – the better our organization, the more glass we can put in front of you!

We’re excited about new personnel and talented old hands in new roles – we’re attracting and cultivating expertise, and our apprenticeship program is growing by leaps and bounds. We’ve brought in Director of Glass Operations Larry Tuber, who brings decades of experience in glassworking and studio management – and put James Woodson on managing our furnaces, especially our newly-mobile Mobile Glassblowing Unit!

This has been a year of fantastic growth and overwhelming customer enthusiasm and engagement! The year’s only half over and we have a lot more exciting design and classic wares coming down the pike. We’re not just still in business after 132 years – we’re growing in leaps and bounds. Welcome to the Blenko Renaissance!