We WON a Guinness World Record!!!

WE WON THE TITLE!

Yes, we did that! It’s literally 2 weeks ago now and it’s crazy to think that we actually pulled off a Guinness World Record win!  But we did!!

The process began in April of 2022. We knew we wanted to have a big summer event where we could celebrate the studio being fully open again, hands-on classes would be offered, BATCH gallery would be full of products available for purchase and we could highlight the new event space.  After weeks of discussion with the folks at Guinness, we came to an agreement on the event record:  Largest Number of Glass Items on Display.

The number to beat was 1,000 items, this is the baseline for any new world record.  We knew the timing was perfect as 2022 is the International Year of Glass, and winning this record would immortalize the Glass Academy as leaders in the field.

Next step was thinking about what those 1,000 items could be.  Sure, we could load the gallery with our regular products as the number of products in the gallery is already over 1,000, but we wanted to do something new.  Something catchy that people would want to join in the fun.

Breath of Michigan was born!!  This event highlighted what we do best; blow glass, talk with the community, have fun and try new things!  It was a blast to meet all sorts of new people, to open the doors to the studio again and to highlight glass blowing as a fun way to try something new.

We also worked with some great organizations to pull off the win.  We picked the top ten organizations that we have worked with since 2004 and figured out a way we could give back to them.  It allowed us to grow our audience and bring attention to the record.  What we didn’t expect was the joy everyone got from participating with us in this event.  The top ten were phenomenal in promoting the event on their social channels, and this brought us some new customers.

At the same time, we were able to bring awareness and attention to their organizations during The Gathering Point show and the in-studio customers loved learning about them as well.

Now, it’s time to build the structure for the bubbles.  We have many ideas on how this is going to happen, but we always have surprises in the building of the sculptures, so we expect the design to change up a bit as we work out the details.  The intent is to have the bubbles suspended in a wire mesh cage representing the Great Lakes around the wooden cutout of Michigan.  Now we need to figure out how to create the cage in the shape of the Great Lakes.  It’s a large feat, but we are up to the challenge!!

Stay tuned for the progress.  We’ll be starting in January of 2023 to build this sculpture as we must make more bubbles!  Seeing the 1,000 bubbles on the table, we now realize that we probably need closer to 3,000 bubbles to make this sculpture complete.  We will be hosting the Breath of Michigan class until the end of the year, but I also suspect we’ll be offering it again in 2023!  Stay tuned for details!