Well, we're coming into Lancaster today, a great historic community down here in Fairfield County.

It's known for the glass industry.

It's not the same industry it used to be, but it's still a great history for this town.

And there's an interesting glass operation that has developed here that I think everybody will enjoy seeing.

I know I will.

Hello.

Hi, I'm Jeff.

Jeff and Dave, it's a pleasure to meet you.

Dave, good to meet you.

Hi, Jason.

Good to meet ya, Jason!

My, what a spectacular space.

I didn't know what to expect and it's beyond what I could have expected.

Yeah.

So here we are at Gay Fad Studios in Lancaster, and tell me more about what's going on here.

Well, Gay Fad Studios is a reimagined business that once existed in Lancaster.

It closed 60 years ago and we brought it back.

So we are actually... Thanks.

It's a bold idea, but it was something that we definitely wanted to undertake.

So how did it start?

Well, it's got an amazing story, and it starts with Fran Taylor, who was a young artist in 1939, who started this business out of her home, hand-painting metalware.

She wanted to bring joy and happiness to the everyday, and did that by decorating everyday functional items.

And over the course of a couple years, she moved her business from Detroit, Michigan, here to Lancaster, Ohio, and hired primarily women.

Artists, art directors, decorators, and started creating whole collections of decorated glassware that she sold all around the world.

Well, it sounds like her business just took off immediately.

She must have hit it the right time.

She did, and she was so creative, had such a great mind for business.

She worked hard and diligently to take a $30 investment that she started the company within less than 10 years, was making over $6 million in today's value.

So that was from 1945 to 1962, she was in operation here until they closed.

So was Fran's studio here?

Not this building, but the original is just about a mile and a half down the street, and we have a wonderful photo of it here on the wall.

In 1945, Fran was actually invited here by some business developers from the city of Lancaster, and she ended up buying three plots of land at 220 Pierce Avenue and designed and built a 46,000 square foot studio, which housed her artist area, she had an office setting, a decoration studio, and then also a distribution center.

The name is, I guess you'd say, unusual.

It was the original name that she gave it.

So Gay Fad's name, when you think of the context of that time period, it's post-Great Depression 1939 when Fran started the business.

As you think about so much economic downturn, a functional item like glassware is such a beautiful way that you can bring happiness back into the home, you can actually interact with it every single day.

So gay meaning happy and fad meaning trend, she wanted the happiness or joy to literally become a trend.

And we can definitely say that here we are a hundred years later, right?

That's when you're nearly... Yeah, and like it's still bringing joy to people's faces.

Well, I'd love to see some of the historical designs.

Well, we'd love to show you.

We actually have a whole museum right over here with over 6,000 original Gay Fad designs.

That sounds promising.

Yeah, right this way.

When we revived Gay Fad three years ago, our mission really was to preserve the history of this company.

And one of the best ways we could do that was collecting the original designs.

You have decanters and cocktail mixing pitchers and high balls of rocks and plates and platters.

So you take that times a thousand designs, we've collected right now over 6,000 original pieces.

And this is the best way that we can tell the original stories, to show people the original products, the original design, and they love it.

The nostalgia hits really hard for folks when they come in and say, oh, I remember my grandparents or my parents having those or using those as a child.

It really is a great harkening back to the 1950s and 60s, where mid-century design and decoration really led with our culture.

I've never seen anything quite this extensive or complete.

Maybe you can describe some of the patterns.

Absolutely one thing that Fran really did over the years was when she first started out as an artist She was really focused on nature and a lot of her original motifs were fruits florals and animals and birds insects Over the time though when she started hiring more designers you get this broad swath of Influence and design we know that all throughout her career Fran was traveling the world to get inspiration but also build business relationships.

She traveled to Japan, she traveled to Europe, she traveled Africa.

And one thing that we really love to see is when she experienced those cultures, she often shared some part of that in her design.

What I love, though, so much about the artistry of Gay Fad, beyond the colors, beyond so many different types of references, is that it's truthfully a snapshot in time.

It's not only a snapshot of the parties that people had, the travel they were really interested in, the moments that they were sharing, but it was also the fact that when Fran grew that business to being very successful and moving into Lancaster.

She was using the platform of gay fad to, in her words, lift the voices of women.

This is post-World War II, and as we especially think about the national conversation about women in the workforce, here was a powerhouse studio that was boldly going towards, like, women's domination in that workforce of demonstrating that they can be a pioneer, that they end up achieving so many great things.

And it sets a wonderful standard that I think we are just so incredibly inspired by.

There was a technical process that either she developed or learned about for getting this material onto the glass surface permanently.

Can you tell me more about that?

Absolutely.

So she actually worked with an engineer for about a year and a half and found a way to use ceramic enamel paints and oven fire them in this long leer oven.

And that would permanently fuse that ceramic paint to the surface of the glass.

Fascinating and how did you manage to pull together such a huge collection of original material?

So we were really fortunate when we first started opening Gay Fad to connect with a woman called Dr.

Donna McGrady.

And she had actually in 35 years of her life collected over 6,000 pieces of her own private collection and actually wrote two books, the only books that exist, documenting Fran's story, the story of Gay Fadd, but then also the actual designs.

She got her hands on a lot of original catalogs and created her own inventory of designs.

So we had those books to reference, really helped us find a lot of these very rare patterns.

Now one other important thing to know about GayFat is that they were in fact a wholesale company.

So they never owned their own retail sales.

They sold to other retailers all across the world.

And this is a wonderful example of a display or gift box that they produced in the 1950s.

And it was all about here's how to be a home bartender.

Oh, look at this.

So you have your original cocktail recipe book And then, of course, all the bar tools that you need to make those cocktails.

The gay 90s design that you see right here was one of the most popular bar sets that they first created.

And that's what really moved them from everyday beverage wear into bar wear all throughout the 1950s and 60s.

Well, you've described the process.

I assume it's similar today, the products that you're producing.

Is there any way we could kind of see what's going on at a factory of some sort and what the process is?

So the process is actually proprietary, but what we can share is that the entirety of what we do is with the same methods and materials today as GAIFAD did back then.

So let's share some of the things that we're doing.

Love to see it.

Well, it looks to me like you're at least as creative as Fran.

I don't know about that, but we're certainly going to try.

So what I'm really happy to share is that with glassware that we're making today, we are using ceramic just as she did back then.

As you see, we have this beautiful frosting, which is a spray technique.

Each of these colors are individually silkscreened on.

And just like as Gay Fad's origin, this is fired to 1200 degrees for three hours.

So it's very much a hand process, a lot of manual work.

Screen printing, okay.

It's been such a great story.

I really appreciate learning all of this.

Why did the place shut down?

Did Frinn pass away or what actually happened?

It was actually in 1962 that a competitor of hers, which was a billion dollar conglomerate, physically came into the property and stole the 1963 designs.

Now, if anyone is familiar with copyrights, it all comes down to how much money do you have to fight to try and get those designs back?

Yes.

And so, unfortunately, despite her closing the business and liquidating everything to try to fight.

It was tragically that a year later, she got into a car accident and that car accident put her into medical care for the rest of her life.

So Gay Fad was never able to return.

However, what we like to think is that Fran was so visionary that her ideas were boundless and that they were literally unrestricted by time to the fact where here we are not even related to Fran and we were so inspired by her story that we saw that we could bring a company back.

We could follow her words, we could follow her mission, and we could continue to really like act as if GayFad never closed.

So what do you see as your legacy here in Lancaster?

Really quite a few things that we're trying to achieve all at once I feel like we've done a really great job of preserving much of the history now that we've collected all of those original pieces And in the next couple years we plan on authoring at least one if not two books, right?

So that's part of preserving the legacy.

The other part is reimagining gay fad today as an actual business We're always looking at diversifying our products.

We always want to be known as a glassware business that was tried and true for Gay Fed, but also we want our legacy overall to be about bringing the innovation, bringing the creativity back into the glassware industry, about demonstrating the importance of small businesses and their ties to the community.

And one of the ways in which we continue to do that kind of work is through a festival that we created in partnership with Visit Fairfield County.

Calm patterns up.

And the real reason behind that was for 120 years, we have been a glass town.

And the idea was really inviting people to come to glass country, have a glass-town experience, and celebrate mid-century barware culture.

You can go to classes, lectures, cocktail parties.

We partner within six blocks of the downtown businesses who all do food specials.

It's really been a magical way of bringing the community together and celebrating a very authentic piece of who we are.

Well, I'd have to think that Fran is there somewhere.

Really glad that you guys picked this up and kept things going.

Thanks so much for a great visit.

Thank you.