How Glass Artist Annie Morhauser Adapted—and Built “Annieglass”

Pauline Bartolone:: This is The Secrets of Mastery, a series of conversations with artisans about what it takes to master their craft and what their journey has taught them. I'm Pauline Bartolone and this is a production of Craftsmanship Magazine, a multimedia publication about artisans and innovators who are creating a world built to last.

On this edition, we'll hear from the founder of Annieglass, who started her business 40 years ago with little more than debt and determination. Today, her glassware can be found on fine dining tables across the country, as well as in the Smithsonian.

Annie Morhauser: The day that I saw my work in the Smithsonian, that was definitely, I'm like, okay, I'm good. I'm done. I can call it a day now, but I have to keep making a living. You know?

Pauline Bartolone: Annie Morhauser first fell in love with glassblowing when she saw the craft at a beach party in the 1970s. She went to art school and began selling her handcrafted glassware at galleries and craft fairs. But soon she learned that wouldn't pay the bills.

So she scaled up and started her company Annieglass, which now has a factory in Watsonville, California. Morhauser has found a way to mass-produce glass plateware that is durable enough to survive a storm, but still has the unique beauty of glass made by the human hand. The 20+ workers at Annieglass use minimal technology, like water jets, to produce Annie's designs for a broad client base that includes high-end department stores like Neiman Marcus, and hotels in Las Vegas.

I wanted to know what Annie Morhauser thought about ideas we've heard in the series so far. Like the importance of trial and error, lessons that are only learned over time, and how mastery involves seeing the big picture. Annie had many reflections to share, as well as her own wisdom about the art of running a business. Annie Morhauser, thank you so much for being on the Secrets of Mastery.

Annie Morhauser: Thank you. I'm honored to be considered a master.

Pauline Bartolone:: When you started out making glass tableware and glass art, did you know you wanted it to be seen by broad sectors of the public and essentially be mass-produced?

Annie Morhauser: I wanted to pay my mortgage. I wanted to use the education I'd worked so hard to get food stamps and scholarships and everything from tuition to California College of the Arts. Those days it was called California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. So I did not envision that by any means. I like to say I had art school-itis.

You know, once I got out of art school, nothing was good enough. Um, you know, nothing met my standards. I was impossible. And, when my husband at the time and I bought a home and the mortgage is 940 a month, I just completely freaked out and said, Oh my God, what can I do? You know, for like a real living, I can't just keep working in a gallery here.

I needed to do something else. And I also felt very strongly that I had worked really hard for my education and I wanted to use it. And so that's when I started Annieglass. Our studio is about 21 people, and we produce about 200 pieces a day, but we've done as high as 400 in the past.

Pauline Bartolone:: You know, you shared with me that when you were growing up, you were raised by a widow, essentially by a single mom. How has that informed your career choices, if at all?

Annie Morhauser: Yeah, I think it made me uniquely prepared to be in the business that I'm in, because adaptability is what, if I don't say anything at all today or I forget to say that, I think that's  number one. I think the secret to mastery is adaptability.

I don't care how talented you are, how much money or opportunity or the right time and place for you to be doing what you're doing. The most important thing is adaptability. And I believe that's the truth with raising children as well, or just success in life is how to adapt because I've had a lot of things to adapt to and being in business in California, being a manufacturer in California, being a craftsman, being a designer, being a glassmaker, being a business person, um, all of those create unique challenges and it's a constant—it's just a constant adaptation all the time.

Pauline Bartolone:: You run a business with over 20 employees. You have numerous sales representatives, showcasing your work, getting it out there. I mean, do you consider yourself still an artisan? Once you get that big, or are you more of a businesswoman?

Annie Morhauser: Well, I have to create the collections that we introduce twice a year. So I'm both. Being in the business that I'm in, where I'm not making an individual painting myself, that's completely different than what we do here. It's a glass factory. We make dishes. People can put them in the dishwasher. We make sculpture. Lord knows what they do with them, but they do, they baptize babies in them. We've gotten pictures.

Once they go out the door, people do what they want with those things and we support them in that, however they like to use them. So I think that's a very freeing thing. That was a tough thing to get used to in the beginning.

But the letting go, I think that's another key to being a successful master is the ability to let go. And also, to trust people. And then if you can't trust them, just know that there's going to be a screw-up. And if there's not one tomorrow, there's going to be one next week, you know?

Also, there's going to be plenty of times that you're wrong. And then when you really thought it wasn't going to work out and something happened that worked out beautifully. I've been really fortunate with the people that I've hired. I learned early on, the best way was to hire up - to hire people who know more than you know. And I think that's, honestly, I think that's really hard for a lot of craft people and artists because you want to be in control and you want to be, you know, your way or the highway. I was like that also in the beginning and had to learn—the school of hard knocks—you can't be that way. You can't keep good people if you treat them that way.

Pauline Bartolone: So this seems like a really basic question, but how do you measure success in your business? So you started out as, you know, going to CCA and you learned how to be a glass artisan, and now you've scaled up and you're at mainstream stores. I mean, do you think you've been successful and how so?

Annie Morhauser: The day that I saw my work in the Smithsonian... that was definitely, I'm like, okay, I'm good. I'm done. I can call it a day now, but I have to keep making a living, you know? How do I measure success? For me now at this age and also all these years at it, I would just say contentment. Being content with what I have done or what I've achieved and that's really more than you can ask for generally, so I feel very fortunate that way.

Pauline Bartolone:: That's great. Just kind of building on previous conversations we've had for this series with master artisans, we talked to a sustainable gardener, a garden designer who said, you know, to reach a level of mastery, there needs to be a lot of trial and error. Do you agree with that, and how has trial and error played out in your career?

Annie Morhauser: Oh, absolutely. But I would like to say that, when you have a factory and production and payroll, you know, and you have a 20-person payroll, you don't have that much margin. And you really don't, because you can't play with other people's livelihoods as well as your own. So, I do recall my brother had moved to Atlantic City and he said, 'do you want to go to the casino?' when I went to visit him.

And I'm like, no, I'm good. And then I'm like, look, I'm self-employed. I gamble every single day with my money, with the bank's money. I'm just happy to make payroll some days. So the trial and error... I try to limit that to my design work. Of course, I have had some big failures. I mentioned the store that didn't work out or different, designs that, oh my God, they're terrible;  I won't even look at them now. Just to go, that's it, we're going to get rid of that one right away, you know, we'll discontinue that one pretty quick. And then above our production area is a mezzanine that's just filled with every design that you may see on our website, for every one of those there's at least 12 or more that are mistakes.

So for every one you see, there's maybe 15 that didn't work out. So, that, that's a constant here. Because we don't have the precision instruments, you know, we don't have the precision machinery to make every one the same. So the glass will fall at a different angle [due to], heat or gravity or a hot spot in the kiln.

There's just so many variables. And that's why we have our "seconds." It's what we call seconds or the seconds room, where we sell off all of our imperfect ones, because Lord knows that seconds rate can can jump up to 7 percent. You know, we've had had some really bad during Covid and all of the shrinkage of how hard it was to get materials and all we have is X percent seconds rate, but every time that something like that happens, that's a huge, uh, kink in our, in our works.

We have to experiment. We have to test something as small as rubber gloves that had powder on them to keep them from sticking, right? Like cornstarch or something. Well, that gets on the glass and then the gold goes over it, and it ruins it. It makes a second. Well, it took forever to figure that out, and someone who'd been with me a really long time, he's brilliant, and he figured it out. He said, that's what it is. You know, it was driving him crazy. I mean, we just had whole kiln-loads that were bad from something as small as that.

Pauline Bartolone: So in terms of things that we've learned from past masters that we've interviewed, I actually just interviewed an entomologist named Doug Tallamy, who's trying to start a homegrown movement to get people with private land to diversify and rewild their lawns. And he was talking about how he did it on his own land in Pennsylvania and how it's taken so long to see the results.

He started with a mowed lawn and then planted all these native plants. And then decades later, he's seeing dozens of species of moths and butterflies, birds, um, that he didn't see before on that land. And. My question to you is like, you've been in this business for 40 years. Is there anything that has taken a really long time to reveal itself in either the glass, the glass creation process, or in the art of having a business?

Annie Morhauser: You ask great questions. I have noticed that in the beginning of my career, there was always a sense of urgency, always trying to meet a deadline, never turned down an opportunity. And then I really noticed the difference of like, wow, I have all of this knowledge now. And I now have the patience that—I think I had patience before, but I don't feel the urge, I will be much more plodding and careful about making something than I might've been in the past, whereas then, I felt like I had to take every opportunity, you know, and I didn't have the knowledge, but now I do.

So I think that part of the experience of trying all these different things, trying it a million different ways and it not working or not having enough time to plan for a show and having samples not ready. You know, all of the mistakes that you can make in a career. That's a good thing to have, because that definitely affects the way I plan for the future now and the way I work now.

Pauline Bartolone: And yeah, I mean, another person that we interviewed, a woodworker, said, like, one of the signs of a master is being able to see the big picture and how all the moving parts fit together.

Annie Morhauser: Yes. Yes. I call that the 30,000-foot view, and times that I've had to make really big decisions, you just pretend you're a bird, you know, up in the sky and you're looking down at how all of these things interconnect if you made that decision.

And I also found that sometimes who I asked for advice was really crucial,  because sometimes who you think you're supposed to ask for advice is actually the wrong person. You need someone who's a bigger thinker, or who's not directly affected by the decision. I'd say that's part of mastery, is knowing who to ask and when. And to know what your job is, and what's not your job.

Pauline Bartolone: Okay. Thank you so much. This has been very insightful and really interesting. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Annie Morhauser is the founder of Annieglass. For more stories about how artisans are making their businesses work, check out our Substack.

You'll find stories about a jewelry archaeologist and a Georgia mom with a custom yarn-dyeing company. And if you haven't already, subscribe to the Secrets of Mastery podcast series at craftsmanship.net. That's craftsmanship. net. You'll find plenty of other stories there too. Music in this series is by Blue Dot Sessions. Thanks for listening.