After 5 years of working, making and selling out of our Albany Park storefront studio, we’re giving up the lease June 1 and downsizing.
Back in 2020 I signed the lease for Manual’s current Chicago storefront studio—shared with Fourneau at the time. It was uniquely well equipped— “clean” office space in the front, a kitchen we built out, a separate “dirty” space in the back for warehouse/tools, and a massive garage “loading dock” area that could fit a box truck. We were stoked to find a studio that could do it all—and we had big plans for running a retail store. A few months later a global pandemic decided to wreck those plans.
Over the years the storefront has been truly great as a studio, a workshop, a warehouse—and a few different pop-up retail concepts. If you’ve ever come by the storefront to pick up an order, shop, or for an event—thanks! As a business that mainly sells online, it’s been immensely rewarding to meet my community face-to-face and have a real connection beyond a screen. Storefront studios are really amazing for feeling engaged with the community—this is the 3rd one I’ve had over the years—and I really recommend it for artists and designers who like to be more public with their work.
But here we are 5 years later and the unpredictable and unhinged “reciprocal tariffs” coming from a reckless and mercurial US administration have destroyed the future of my glassware line—an 145% tariff has derailed everything I spent over a decade building.
Small businesses are simply not set up to pivot to new manufacturers at a moment’s notice—we work with contract manufacturing facilities and squeeze our relatively short runs into their packed calendars. Much of the world’s best contract manufacturing is in China—even the raw borosilicate tubes used in our glass manufacturing are almost 100% made in China—and most all of the talent in shaping the glass tubes is there as well. It’s simply not realistic that a US-based borosilicate contract manufacturer would ever get off the ground in the US—much less one with US-produced glass tubes. The labor costs alone would make a set of Manual mugs cost many times more than anyone would pay.
This trade war is going to destroy many small businesses. I know many small studios and product companies personally that were founded in the early social media/Kickstarter days that found sustainable ways to run small product-based businesses. Many of them are panicking, pivoting hard, or calling it quits. I’m not ready to give up, but I’m also not able to keep moving on the same path I took to get here.
With disruptive bookends on each end of my time in this space, it feels like the right moment to move on and shift what I’m doing with Manual. I’m not sure what the new model will be, but you’ll be seeing more experimental work, more small batch local production, and a lot more exploration. There won’t be a public-facing space for Manual in the near term, but there is an interesting opportunity on the 2026 horizon. More on that for another time.
