Flame Affinity Group Meeting Notes: The Economics of Flameworking

• Jewelry:
  • Jewelry for the contemporary jewelry collector market and people who like large jewelry 
  • Make jewelry, trying to make things I haven’t really seen before, like unusual glass beads and chains
  • Production jewelry, which has a specific audience (ex. production implosion pendants) and contemporary jewelry
  • Make marbles and implosion pendants. Popular as far as jewelry goes, and a great way to get your stuff out there in the world
  • I’ve done beads and bead shows, did jewelry for many years
• Fabrication/consultation:
  • Consulting for shipping and crating of glass (particularly delicate and flameworked items)
  • Fabrication for other artists (contemporary art world) 
  • Spent a year making chains for Calvin Klein’s runway shows
  • Make prep for other artists who use glass parts in mixed media sculpture 
  • Fabrication for artists. The audience is the contemporary artist, or whoever their audience is, and that’s a bigger part of my income stream
• Gig work:
  • Pretty common to diversify your income stream
  • Glass adjacent gigs: public speaking, lecturing and teaching as an advocate for flameworking. All paid work. Audience largely institutional. 
  • I’ve been a gig worker for 25 years; lots of different income streams that are all flameworking related or adjacent
• Pipes:
  • Making pipes to bring in side-money, because renting time in the hot shop was expensive and I didn’t have access.
  • First Fridays in downtown LA, setting up a table and selling pipes.
  • I would do some consignment at pipe shops, and then also I was just hitting people up on the streets and asking hey are you interested in some glass
  • “Making pipes for a side hustle.”
• I am doing a lot of stuff around flameworking that I guess a lot of people don’t get involved with.
  • Would say my audience is myself, at this point, because I am really just interested in exploring the medium.
  • I do a lot of research and development, material science, trying to figure out and understand glass. I write up some of the stuff that I come up with so that other people can tread and hopefully use as a jumping off point.
  • Flameworking ceramics and glass 
• Teach glass and other things
• In grad school for illustration and making dioramas of handmade glass and laser cut textiles that I’m photographing to illustrate children’s books I’ve written 
• Sculptures and performance art with flameworking. Try to make my work accessible — the audience is the general public. Wanted to foster a wider entry point to glass.
• Including bits and pieces that are sculpted on the torch to use in my larger sculptures made in the hotshop
• Reusing glass from the hotshop to then repurpose and potentially making a product line
• Make work resembling plants, succulents, coral, etc.
• I worked at REI, and used to make snails with little pins on them and would sell these to my fellow employees at work. 
• Scientific glassworking:
  • I work in Research and development in Silicon Valley and that really set me up for where I am now- I have a corporate scientific job with Bruce Suba as my mentor doing glass to metal seals. That set me up to now be in a position to just make my own work for fun, to just be an artist. 
  • Scientific glassworking = flameworking for a living. Getting paid to practice your skills that you can then use for your side hustles. 
  • I still have my own (flameworking) business since the 70s, but I also do scientific apparatus and that gives me the ability to do whatever I want. 
• My husband and I run a glass art studio in British Columbia. It’s about building a community and learning what the community needs from you as a flameworker. Just find your niche within that.
  • My husband did a lot of goblets. We started teaching and building a community who appreciated art. 
  • We moved to a town of about 5000 people, going from doing big art shows to communicating directly with our customers, with walk-in traffic to our shop. Now we are dealing with distributors (pipes) 
  • Many revenue streams: we do scientific repair for local University, we do upcycled glass work from recycled bottles into reusable goods, pipes, that are sold mostly through distributors and the big trade shows.
• Podcasting:
  • I do a podcast (Taming Lightning) where I talk about neon and plasma. Skill sets are in the hotshop, but I also use flameworking principles to get a better overall seal in the hotshop and find ways I can use that in the flame shop as well.
  • Podcasting and lecturing as a glass adjacent income stream
  • Provide content for a YouTube producer to make a glassblowing YouTube show (Gather Glass with Wildfire) to educate the audience and community. Doesn’t really make money, but increases exposure. Started with a podcast, then a live show, now it’s monthly. Doing an interview with Marble Slinger who has a new movie coming out. Crosspollinate with other artists and producers. 
• Recently working on a commission for plasma chops, cups were fabricated, and I filled them with gasses. People reach out to me from IG, Facebook, etc.
• Portable glassblowing studio that we take into the community to demonstrate and share about glassblowing and flameworking and what we do.
• “Recycled glass production line.” 
• “Servicing other studios”
• Started with selling stuff out of my trunk, but I realized that I didn’t want to live this way.

• Impact of COVID-19:
  • When COVID hit there was a huge drop and supply chain issues, getting flameworking supplies and glass was difficult because color comes from the US so it is hard to be competitive with pricing. 
  • During COVID, we lost the ability to connect with our customers, people were not hanging out and sharing glass, that’s what the cannabis community is all about. 
  • When teaching went online it was an opportunity for students to learn about the history of glass. It really opened my mind up. I had everyone look at the history of painting, and look at the glass in paintings, and tell me how the glass was made.
  • During COVID we had to build out communities, both in person and online. Online we can connect with a global audience.

• YouTube, TikTok, Livestreaming:
  • More and more folks are monetizing their YouTube channel, or live streaming, doing more income generating activities with social media and connecting with their audiences to sell their work through the internet. 
  • I started making TikTok videos – TikTok reached out to me to make educational videos during the pandemic. So I started making glass-related content for the general public as an audience. It has become a significant source of income for me. 
  • For a while it seemed like IG reels were paying a lot of money (“quit your day job’ money) TikTok tried to compete by paying creators. As a creator, I’m trying to take advantage of the giant companies competing with each other. 
  • Making content generates a significant amount of income, and also keeps your audience engaged, and potentially opportunities to sell your work. 
  • For the long run, I think YouTube has more potential for monetization
  • Live streams can be a good source of income, and people will send you gifts and flowers, products, etc.
• I’ve been talking about shifting towards online, but I was going in that direction anyways. 
• I did the UrbanGlass hotline where I talked about plasma, and combined a lecture and demonstration. I find that because of how spread out people are in neon and plasma, I have almost no choice but to reach people through online references. 
• @surfratglass at a previous meeting shared how he pivoted during the pandemic to find a new audience and ended up monetizing his IG account and creating content that way by live streaming and making videos. 
• The possibility of making objects to sell, but then also being able to monetize that time you are making by having a live stream. 
• Most of my work is going through a gallery or through a couple of art fairs that I do locally, but by galleries recently retired. I’m looking to get more things on. My online shop. 

Financing Your Art Practice

• Having a day job, like teaching or fabrication, takes the economic pressure off my art
• You really need to do what you love and finance it somehow
• Saving and planning ahead:
  • Spent over a decade in tech, managed to save up enough to not have to rely on making working in the glass sustainable
  • Interesting stuff not going to be sustainable in the beginning — so maybe finding some way to make the money beforehand
• Last year, saved up and took on a bunch of work so that this year I could take more creative risks and build a new audience with my own sculpture. I would put that in the research and development category.

• For production: think of an hourly minimum rate you want to make, then build in the cost of materials.
  • Develop a calculator: consider how much to pay yourself hourly, whether to hire an assistant, think through the steps to complete the project and estimate the time needed to complete the project.
  • If you work at an institution, factor in studio rental.
  • When selling art, look at what other people are doing for pricing info.
  • For fabrication and consulting: Add 20% for overhead, labor, materials (include shipping)
• For commissions, customs, fabrication, or services:
  • There’s a lot of R&D involved, there’s email communication, documenting and sending pictures of the progress. 
  • Sometimes clients have a fixed budget, like funding or grants from a museum
  • Find someone doing something similar, consider developing a mentorship
  • When fabricating or doing commissions, I am not doing the selling or marketing. When making my own work, I have to accommodate marketing. So I use a higher overhead because I’m wearing more hats as an artist than as a fabricator.
  • Repairs on a piece can be difficult to estimate (time and cost) if there are too many unknown variables, or if I’m asked to do something that is out of my wheelhouse. In those cases, start with a bigger number because project management is involved. 
  • Add in travel and build it into your contract. Include lodging.
  • Also set down some boundaries. I.E. Make sure they have all the parts first before you travel for install so you’re not wasting your time.
• Value of mentorship:
  • For a service I call “Technical Consultation” where I go service a manifold and organize an institution’s setup. Rusty Russo helped me first establish an hourly rate ($45/hr).
• Pricing artwork/jewelry and research:
  • For sculpture in the fine art market, there are some price breaks to know about. Small sculptures (under $3000) start here first. Once you’ve sold in that range, try $3000 to $5000, then $5000 to $10,000. Different collectors in each range. Galleries and art fairs use this pricing structure. 
  • Research who your peers/competitors are, and consider what the market will bear. Look at whose work is selling and for what in different venues like galleries and art fairs. A little bit of market research will take you a long way.
  • With contemporary jewelry, knowing your client and their price ranges so that you can make sure you’re marketing to the right client with your price point. 
  • What does the landscape of the market look like that you are trying to enter? Helps to be realistic about your price point (and confident about it, too.) If you’re not getting a good response to the work, it will be easier to troubleshoot because either your prices are out of whack, or it’s the wrong market for you.
  • Donating your work to auctions can be a good research tool to see what people will be willing to pay for a specific piece (can be incredibly valuable info)
  • I saw on an IG story an implosion pendant similar to mine going for double the price that I was selling at and decided to up my prices in my Etsy store. Learning what the market will bear is a valuable insight.
• Give yourself a buffer (of a few hundred $) if you need to reschedule or redo something
• I don’t make pieces as a commodity, and don’t want to put that pressure on this specific work. Tricky to price my performance art/sculpture because there are hundreds of hours on a piece. Ex: an object that is used on the body in a performance, that will be exhibited with the video performance — the price becomes a kind of token of the burden. 
• To survive: I teach, do production and fabrication. These income streams support my personal art practice which takes up an equal amount of time. 
• Not everybody is your client, and it’s really important to be able to separate yourself from your work, because it can get emotional when for example, with jewelry a client says “I love your work, but it’s way too expensive for me.” Consider the possibility that your prices may be fine, but this may not be your client/audience for the work. 
• When work sells at auction, contact the buyer because that adds to your audience.
• The 10% rule: If you have a business, you should always have sales goals. If you meet your yearly goal, then you raise your prices by 10%. When you raise your prices, you can expect to lose 10% of your clients, who are not able to grow with you. But you will still make the same amount of money. This is one way to build your business by elevating the value of your products incrementally based on sales performance. 
• “This might be from my esoteric position, but if I focus on economics, I find that it constrains what I can do too much. In order to take into account the economics means that I have to focus on a larger/popular audience… and I am not really interested in either consuming or producing things for that. My interests are very niche, and in order to be in that area, I cannot maximize economics. Those things seem to be mutually exclusive”

How do you handle extras/seconds that are nice but aren’t selling?

• Should we try to employ the bartering system more?
  • Barter the seconds, buy the firsts.
  • “The barter system is alive and well! I supplement my $ income with bartering.”
• Seconds sales online:
  • Saw another glass artist live on TikTok doing a studio cleanout sale, everything was around $5. Use the chat to buy, artist will ship it to you. 
  • Doing a clean out sale on social media – you don’t know who is watching.
  • Tempted to do online sales and would love to sell to my friends for cheap, but worried about degrading my prices.
• Ideas and concerns about selling/promotion:
  • Open house in our studio once a year — that’s the only time we put out the seconds. Connecting with people face to face shows dedication if client’s are willing to show up for the seconds sale.
  • Hide and Seek:
    • Hide your seconds in a park and take a picture to post online so someone can find it – stash and dash, geotagging.
    • Doing Hide and Seek and connecting with people online are about building community, and in turn, hopefully those people will buy your work. Also it helps value your product by boosting your visibility in the algorithm and linking and sharing your account with other people. All of these are marketing tools that we now have at our fingertips.
  • Hosting a dinner party and charging an entry fee and everyone can take an object home with them. 
• I’ll sell it to a friend for cheap, or give it away if it’s the difference between keeping it or throwing it away. 
• I destroy the seconds because after I’m gone they might become mixed up with the firsts. We don’t have control over what our legacy is. 
• I’ll cannibalize pieces and reconfigure them into new pieces of jewelry
• Being a glassworker, and having to deal with storage of first quality work, in addition to seconds. 
• Electrician working on my house bought a piece from me. I was excited because it was not my regular audience. I also bartered with the HVAC guy and made him a set of elephants.
• Recycling glass in a vitreograph kiln – making cane for bead makers, vitreograph paintings. All glass is recyclable, people!
• “Glass collage”
• “Brooklyn Glass! Hot Glass Cold Beer!”

Digital Income Streams

• Cameo App:
  • Pay celebrities/personalities for short custom messages.
  • Could it be an educational tool? On-demand educational videos, or tech support. An information sharing opportunity for custom glass videos. 
• Rights to content:
  • Consider if you are giving exclusive rights to your content or video.
  • Are you letting a big platform repost your videos for free? That allows others to profit from your content if their account is monetized.
  • Consider a Sole Licensing agreement, where you license rights to your content, but still retain rights to use it yourself as well.
  • I can change the content slightly and license it, or just recreate the content. 
• “Would this be the time to bring up the issue of how the net is pretty much dominated by a handful of companies, and have enormous amounts of influence on what gets seen and not seen? I feel like depending on these platforms to stay sustainable is a risky bet”

• In college, I learned how to make a business card and a resume. The niches of how to make a living never came up.
  • How do you keep up your social media? If you’re not into that, how do you develop a relationship with galleries?
  • How do you enter into a market?
  • What are the different types of markets?
  • How do you balance the right level of professional persona and also personal persona for the internet? How do you seem like a real person but also cultivate your own brand?
  • Teaching people how to be fluid with technology.
  • How to write a cover letter 
  • “I’m constantly surprised when artists don’t understand some tech standards… file formats, jpg tiff png, along with formatted text documents as MS word docs instead of standards like PDF”
• Documentation:
  • “I finally started to hire people to document exhibitions and it makes such a huge difference. I attribute those images to getting me additional opportunities. So definitely worth the money in the end.
  • Can you use the barter system to have a friend take pictures for you? Documentation is everything.
• I think it’s important to think about how we are using energy.
  • There is just so much waste and we need to get a hold of that. Glass is an incredibly recyclable material. Are we using it to its fullest potential?
  • What is the right COE for what you are trying to do? Where are we setting our torches? What torch?
  • What is the lowest temperature you can go to create what you want to make? Ex: murrini could be COE 96 or 104 instead of 33.
• Personal energy and the economics of personal time.
  • How are you spending your time? Do we have to do everything ourselves, or can we delegate? Recognizing when there is a huge learning curve that could be overcome by bringing in a collaborator, jobbing out a task. (tech, photography, etc.) When to spend the money.
  • You don’t have to do everything yourself, especially as your business grows 
  • Don’t waste your time reinventing the wheel — pay a professional to get it done.
  • Ex: Paying for a good photo of your work can then allow you to access more opportunities, and you are also supporting another artist (photographer)
  • Making things with intent (building things that are useful and thoughtful) as a way of talking about energy management.

Media Training

• Media training used to be done by PR firms in preparation for publicly representing an art center in the media, especially on live television, and in interviews where you are representing an institution. An extension of public speaking.
  • Handy for podcasting and lecturing
  • Also helpful for more spontaneous events, like receiving an award, where you set the tone and language with your audience.
• Social media, live streaming, “dos and don’ts” 
• When asked a question, repeat the question in your answer to provide context

• Material costs, cost of gas, inflation
• Flameworking is one of the most economic forms of hot glass working with much less overhead than other forms of hot glass working. 
• My middle range of sales haven’t been great, but the lesser priced items do well and the higher priced items do well. So, I’m better off spending my time cutting out the mid range and focusing on the top and bottom of the markets. 
• Starting a flameworking studio at home to offset costs and increase access to hot glass so I can make things in the $45-75 range, and I can sell a lot of those and they don’t take much time to make. Also, I can prep flameworked parts ahead of time to be used on bigger work in the hotshop. 

NFTs and energy usage

• NFTs as an alternative to print
  • Make glass lenses that I use on my camera to make digital images. Rather than making them into a physical print, I opted to make them into NFTs so they can stay in the digital realm.
  • Making a tool to generate art: I can blow one lens and use that to make an infinite amount of images.
• Carbon footprint:
  • Rarible platform allows you to list an NTF for sale, but with no blockchain activity until a sales transaction takes place. This way I can minimize the energy usage up front and be more intentional about how energy is used.
  • Joe Lee did some research and calculated that the gas usage for minting one NFT is about equal to firing two ceramic kilns. Translating into glassmaker and ceramic terminology.
• Projecting NFTs:
  • I like the idea that it doesn’t have a physical format but can exist into the physical world through projection. I’ve been projecting them onto sculptures. 
• NFTs have not been fruitful for me monetarily, but have been useful in community building. Value in opportunities to generate conversation.
• Proof of stake and proof of work on the blockchain
  • “tezos is proof of stake, and very low energy”

Is there an investment (i.e. a piece of stock/tool) you’ve made that you regret?

• Tools:
  • I’ve bought more pairs of grabbers than I will ever need. 
  • At what point are you just collecting tools?
  • A butter knife is gonna give you the same result (as a fancy tool). My favorite tool is my housemate’s butter knife. 
  • Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.
• Conferences:
  • At conferences, I always buy the same colors and then never use them. Specifically, it’s a black glass that turns rainbow when you melt it. Apparently I am seduced by this color when shopping in person.
  • India green, it was super cheap at a conference. It is super ugly though. Now that it is out of production is it worth $$
• I hoard color and tools I’ll never use, just to collect.
• I think mine would be more like patternmaking. There’s this old type of pattern that neon people use that has fiberglass elements to it. It is noxious, and smells when you use it. Paper and a wire screen is all I need.
• “I have some lead paint powder”

• Heather Kraft’s Pricing Structure Worksheet (Glass Resource Exchange):
  • https://geex.glass/pricing-structure-worksheet/
• Taming Lightning Podcast (Percy Echols II):
  • www.taminglightning.net
• “The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech” by William Deresiewicz
  • https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250125514/thedeathoftheartist
• Example of NFT Marketplace (Amy Lemaire on Rarible):
  • https://rarible.com/amylemaire/owned

• If you are just starting out selling your work, reaching out to your community is a great way to start. People want to support you. Start small and local, branch out from there. 
• Hustle is like your building community, it’s you connecting with people, and that’s eventually going to be the people who carry you to where you want to be with glass. 
• “Support your contemporaries too by sharing their work, there are no competitors. When it comes back, they will think of you.”