Glass-Blowing Studio Moving Into ‘Union Station’ This Summer
SAINT JOHN — The entrepreneur behind a glass-blowing business will be moving home from Ontario and opening a shop in uptown Saint John this summer.
Glass Roots Canada Inc. will be moving into the ground floor of 156/154 Union Street, formerly an old fire station that was purchased by Holly and Ken Singh in 2018 and recently underwent renovations.
Glass Roots Canada is a glass-blowing business that specialized in crystal ash memorials, glass awards, and a variety of other glass works like figurines, drinkware, ornaments, etc for retail and wholesale.
The company was founded in New Horton back in 2008 by Curtis Dionne, who started glass blowing as a teenager.
“We started with a woodfire glassblowing furnace with all this homemade equipment and we did the best we could with that for a lot of years,” said Dionne. “Plus we were involved with the studio that opened in Cap Breton on the Cabot Trail and we were blowing glass there for about eight summers while living in New Brunswick for the rest of the year.”
The idea was to always setup up a bigger studio, but time and money held up those plans. Besides the woodfire studio, the company also had a gallery in Riverview (which is still open)
“We always wanted to set up a more professional public-style glassworks with access to glass blowing for glasses and other artists, but it’s so prohibitively expensive,” said Dionne. “The equipment for glass blowing, for a small business like ours, it’s like $60-70,000 to just get started. Somehow over the years, we were never able to really come up with the capital to do that.”
When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived last year, like many businesses Glass Roots faced financial troubles and had to close their glass blowing studio. Dionne and his wife, Charlotte Macleod (who’s also a glassblower), decided to move to Ontario where Dionne was offered a residency opportunity.
“We came to Ontario … and continued to blow glass for Glass Roots,” said Dionne. “But it worked out that that I was only getting about one day a week at the facility, and I thought it would have been a lot more.”
But business for Glass Roots was strong, with the company getting lots of online orders, particularly from its Etsy shop that launched in November. The majority of the orders were coming from back home.
“At Christmas time, we had an amazing amount of Etsy orders and when we looked at it, it was 80-90 percent going to New Brunswick,” said Dionne.
“We were like, ‘maybe we made the wrong move coming to Ontario.'”
With Covid-19 provincial travel restrictions showing no signs of lifting, Dionne and MacLeod made the decision to move home.
“We just realized how important it is. We didn’t want to be separated from our community, our friends and our family like we are here,” said Dionne.
“We just decided that at all cost, we wanted to go home. We wanted to be home. We might not have everything we need or all the money we need, but we’re going to give it all we got and go there.”
After looking throughout the Maritimes, they found the perfect spot at 154 Union Street in Saint John. The glass studio will be on the ground-level, with Dionne, MacLeod and their children living in an upstairs unit.
“Up popped this beautiful building that was an old fire station and it was ‘wow, this is the dream.’ This is the kind of thing you dream about when you’re a glassblower.”
Glass Roots has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help with the costs of the equipment. By the time of publication, the company had already surpassed its $25,000 goal.
“When we set up, we’ll be setting up with top-notch world-class equipment,” said Dionne.
The new facility will allow Glass Roots to double down on their production, allowing them to grow in both retail and wholesale in a way they weren’t able to before.
RELATED: Welcome to Union Station: Holly and Ken Singh Buy Old Fire Station in Uptown Saint John
“Having this new facility where we can produce our glass full-time is really going to open the floodgates for wholesale and export,” said Dionne. “Because we got so many clients that want the product, but we’re having a hard time keeping up with producing it in our current situation and or in our previous situation. The problem for us has been being able to produce enough.”
The new studio will also be open to the public for classes and demonstrations.
“It’s going to be a great glass facility where we’ll be able to offer classes and demonstrations all the time and bring that culture of glass to inner Saint John,” said Dionne.
Dionne says they also plan to open it to other glass artists around the country looking to work in New Brunswick.
“We’ve got interest already from several other glassblowers from around the country that considered relocating to Saint John or to New Brunswick, but they just can’t do it because there’s no facility,” he said. “We’re hoping to offer support for these glass artists. A facility that they can thrive and do their own artwork as well.”
Glass Roots takes possession of the building on May 1 with plans to have the studio open and operational sometime during the summer once necessary renovations are completed.