Bottled Up
The Blue Bag's Glass Gifts Are Pretty and Eco-Friendly

From the outside, it looks like your average home on a well-kept street in a Cleveland suburb. But just beyond the cozy living room, a small business booms. Production takes place in the basement. Two first-floor bedrooms double as shipping and storage areas and the owner’s office. From here, orders are processed and filled; boxes are loaded with fragile gifts and sent off to places around the world.

In just a couple of years, the Blue Bag has become a highly successful specialty gift company and a leader in Cleveland’s efforts to reuse and recycle.

Artist Deby Cowdin has been working with glass for 15 years. In 2006, she had an idea to heat and flatten glass bottles so they could be used as serving trays. As she worked with the glass, she discovered she could flatten all but the top and bottom of the bottles, which would serve as "legs" for the trays. The glass serving items could hold hot or cold foods and could be placed in the refrigerator, oven or dishwasher without being damaged.

Now, a bottle-turned-cheese-tray is a novel idea, but how do you capitalize on that design and make it something that almost anyone would treasure? First, Cowdin decided to work with lots of different types of bottles. In the inventory area of her home, you see boxes filled with flattened Absolut Vodka bottles, Wild Turkey bottles and olive oil bottles. Next, Cowdin began to engrave unlabeled bottles. "We can personalize a bottle for any occasion," she says. One of the Blue Bag's most popular items is a wine bottle with a wedding couple’s invitation engraved on top. It's a gift that is usable, Cowdin says, and that reminds the couple of their special day.

The Blue Bag is represented in more than 60 retail stores around the country. Items can also be ordered online. Reaching beyond the Cleveland market has proven to be successful for the Blue Bag, but Cowdin is careful about how and where her items are displayed. "Our product takes salesmanship; it won't sell itself," says Cowdin, who once sold computers to the federal government. "We hand-pick the stores, and we have three sales representatives."

The Blue Bag believes in customer service, customer loyalty and friendliness to the environment, she adds. The stores where her glass items are sold understand and promote that concept.

As their company grew, Cowdin and her husband, Scott, realized that recycling would be a big part of their business. They needed glass bottles, obviously. And if you’re mass-producing olive oil-dipping trays, cheese trays and serving plates, you need quite a few bottles all at once. The Blue Bag has formed relationships with restaurants and other establishments in the area, including the I-X Center, Playhouse Square, Executive Caterers, Wonder Bar and Macaroni Grill. "I'm known as the 'Bottle Lady,'" Cowdin says. "We take everything and use what we can. What we can't use, we recycle."

Businesses are not charged for the service, she adds.

The Blue Bag collected glass from last summer's Vintage Ohio, the annual local wine-tasting festival held in Lake County. "We collected 500 cases of glass. That's 12 bottles per case," Cowdin says to emphasize the magnitude of the collection. "That would have all gone to a landfill."

The recycling hasn't stopped with bottles. The Blue Bag uses shredded documents for packing material and recycles bubble wrap and packing peanuts. Every time the company ships items to a store, it includes a return label so the box can be sent back to the Blue Bag and reused. "It only costs five or six dollars to ship a box back," Cowdin says, "and the box will last two to four times."

Cowdin continues to devise new ways of manipulating glass and creating unique items. The Blue Bag’s chardonnay and merlot series features kiln-fired bottles with a touch of clear or red liquid added to the bottle to look as though there is some wine left inside. Colorful glass beads and curvy wire decorate the top of the bottle. The series includes a serving dish, a cheese tray and a business card holder.

Cowdin has kept prices affordable—items from the Blue Bag range from about $20 to $99.

Business has increased by 75 percent since last year, according to Cowdin, which may explain why parts of her home are loaded to the gills with business-related items. The garage and a 10X20-foot tent in the backyard are filled with cases of bottles. "We only have one bedroom left upstairs," Cowdin says. The Blue Bag may eventually have to find a home of its own, but the decorative glass bottles will always be close to Cowdin's heart.

Check out what's in the Blue Bag at http://www.fromthebluebag.com.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Diane DiPiero ohiodianeATnetzero.net
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