After graduating in 1988 my then girlfriend and business partner Joanne Andrighetti and I moved back to Vancouver. We started a studio on 4^th Ave at Burrard. After struggling to come up with a name we finally chose Joanne’s last name. She was reluctant at first, but I pointed out that it had a nice traditional sound to it. Thus, Andrighetti Glassworks was born.

Starting a business is tough, really tough. The money that you go through is staggering. Glass furnaces are not cheap and no one built them at that time so it was all do it yourself. We were not doing all that well, financially speaking, by the fall of 1990. You can only eat so much Kraft Dinner and Ramen noodles.

It was a particularly crazy day, all sorts of stuff happening on the studio floor when these two guys came to our studio, both in suits, asking if we could make vases. "Sure" I said although I hadn’t made any for a while. Could we do it with gold? "Sure" I said although I hadn’t ever worked with any. We talked for a while longer and I got an idea of what they wanted. Over the next few weeks I made a number of vases for them. (It turned out that the suits were the President and General Manager of Coast Paper).

It was their fiftieth Anniversary and they wanted a vase for each and every employee nationwide, over 300. We eventually settled on a specific style and colour and price.

The really important thing was that Joanne and I had to borrow bus fare to go and get the down payment check for $10,000. We were that tight. But it turned the corner for us and we were never that desperate again.