Our story
A garage, a dachshund, and twenty years of hand-cut glass.
We started in 2004, in a small garage, with a workbench, a borrowed glass cutter, and a lot of stubbornness. Amélia handled the glass: cutting, sanding, and engraving every piece by hand. Her husband handled the wood: oak cases, sealed bases, the ageing process.
The early years were hard work and a lot of trial and error. We spent whole nights in the garage, and more pieces of glass broke than we ever managed to sell. We had no formal training. We taught ourselves, cut by cut, mistake by mistake, until we figured out [insert here what you actually discovered: e.g. "that the secret was in the glass's temperature before it was cut", or "with the help of a master glassblower who taught us in a weekend course"].
That slow process is what taught us the technique we still use today. It's also what let us grow: every decanter sold in those early years went straight back into buying more glass, more cutting discs, and later, our first annealing kiln, the equipment that let us stop depending on borrowed materials and start producing with the quality we have now.
Over the years, Whiskers grew from a garage into a small shop, always with the same handmade process: no mass production, no automatic molds. Every decanter that leaves here has passed through both our hands.
Over the past few months, a health issue of Amélia's has made the fine, repetitive work of engraving, done under a magnifying glass, increasingly difficult to keep up. After a lot of talking it through, we decided this will be our final collection. There's no restock: once the remaining pieces are sold, we're closing the workshop.
We're still selling them ourselves, at the shop, for as long as we can. It's our way of closing this chapter with some peace, and of thanking everyone who has trusted our work over these twenty years.
