IN THE BEGINNING…I wasn’t there…

This is circa 1975, maybe 18 months after Bullseye started. From left to right that’s Ray, David, Dan (my partner), Dave (without his magpie), Liz, Kerry and Vicky.

I got here in 1983. More about that - and me - later. For now, what matters is that this is my first blog. Where I’m going to try to tell you about Bullseye, the company. It’ll take a few episodes to get you up to date. Then we can deal with being BE - today.


MIRROR SHOCK

People who grow up fat, then lose a lot of weight, often still think of themselves as fat.

We are what we were.

Bullseye was once three art students with a lot of curiosity and not much business sense. They’d never been inside a sheet glass factory when they decided to build one. They used a 1930’s John Deere Lindeman tractor to crush bottle cullet and a health spa “shaker belt” to drive their frit screening machine. They cast a bunch of crude sheet glass that came in shapes lovingly referred to as “cow tongues” and “guitar backs”. They kept beer on tap. But the factory’s policy manual made it clear this was a serious company: “No smoking of pot or drinking of beer until 2 PM or all major decisions of the day have been made.”

As soon as they were on the edge of profitability, making a respectable line of Tiffany-style glasses for the stained glass trade, the guys - that’s Dan and his partners Ray and Boyce - got obsessed with the idea of melting this glass together in a kiln. That’s when they discovered incompatibility. Obviously they then had to figure out how to test for it and get rid of it. That’s when the world’s first line of Tested Compatible glass was born. And when the company’s bottom line really started to flatline.

Drop by tomorrow to find out whether Bullseye survived. Yeah, a real cliffhanger, eh?