Being named The Coolest Thing Made in Oregon for 2025 by Oregon Business & Industry could have given us all fat heads.
In the majestic auditorium of the Portland Art Museum—amidst über-impressive competition like Daimler Trucks and Tillamook Cheese—Jim, Ted, Sam, Mary Kay, and I sat shell-shocked as Dan accepted the trophy from the president of Oregon Business & Industry.
Looking back over 50 years of hand-casting colored glass in Southeast Portland alongside the Union Pacific railroad tracks—growing from three hippie glassblowers fresh out of college; using methods unwittingly resurrected from the 17th century; selling our wonky wares up and down the West Coast from the back of a VW microbus; chasing a market that didn’t yet exist (glass fusing); melting recycled Pepsi bottles in hand-built furnaces behind a dilapidated wood-framed house in a neighborhood then called “Garlic Gulch”—how could we not marvel at the trip it’s been?
Bullseye’s goofball story of hippies growing up while inventing an industry is so offbeat and unexpected, it’s almost too easy to overlook the most important thing they made.
That “thing” is Community: the international tribe of makers who joined the little factory to build a world of new knowledge, wandered together into unknown territory, experimented, failed, recovered—and, most importantly, shared what they learned.
Today, Bullseye’s reach exceeds 100,000 contacts from the Arctic Circle to Argentina. We sell into six of the seven continents, through more than 70 distributors from Finland to South Africa, and we build relationships with everyone from elementary schools to graduate programs, from museums in London to Toyama, Japan.
Without the community that grew up alongside Portland’s post-grad hippies, being named The Coolest Thing Made in Oregon would not have been possible.
What made it happen was energy and eagerness to share: knowledge hard-won, mostly naïve, occasionally brilliant, always supportive—the users (you!), the distributors (tenacious), the teachers (paid or not), the world of supporters who made this goofball little factory what it has become. In sum, instead of feeling inflated by a sense of accomplishment, winning this award left us elated by a sense of accompaniment.
For me and the Bullseye team, YOU, our community, are the coolest thing ever made in Oregon. Thank you for the journey.
And thank you, OBI, for recognizing all of us.
— Lani McGregor, Bullseye Glass Co-Owner
