Pod, Birds, Deals, and Great ABI too!

The latest From the Fabricator podcast is now live and I’m thrilled about how it turned out. Three unique and cool people joined me, and we covered a ton of items. 

Leading off was Sophia Panova of SO-ZHA Architects. Very talented person who “gets it” and I enjoyed her perspective throughout. She is on her way to being a force in that community. Then to Mark Rabinowitz of Paul Rabinowitz Glass and we covered the great work he and his team does, challenges in our space, and what’s ahead. Last it was fun to catch up with Bill Wilson of Specified Systems. Bill has done an amazing job building his company and setting it up for great success going forward, plus the recognition he and his company shared on some folks was very cool.  

So all in all this was a fun one and it was 3 people in one form or fashion who bet on themselves to take their places in our industry/world and do better by it. This is a perfect episode to catch during the upcoming holiday too! Thank you for listening/watching!

Watch the video here and listen here, as well as on Apple, Spotify, Google etc.

Elsewhere…

Plant tour

I was honored to be invited on an online plant tour of Orion Laser Tech on Belgium via their partners here in the US, IGE Glass Technologies. Orion is making a bird friendly laser engraver for glass, and it was stunning to see it in action and learn more about it. Really remarkable technology and important in a space that keeps growing.  

Thank you, Michael Spellman, for the invite and opportunity to watch, and once again Michael is on the front end of a break-through technology! I am told that they’ll be more of these online tours coming, so if you are interested in bird friendly fabrication, you’ll want to get with IGE to check it out!

Selling season

I was telling a future podcast guest this week that we are in the middle of “selling season” in our industry and within 24 hours deals by OBE and Assa Abloy went down. With some of the uncertainty of 2024, many owners are thinking now is the time to get out, so I am expecting more deals to come. As for the OBE-Syracuse deal, really made sense for both sides. Nice move for OBE to jump into that territory and a good exit for the folks from Syracuse post the very sad passing of Joe Gudenburr.

Good ABI

Last week I said I was dreading the ABI, expected misery and then jokingly said it’ll probably be up since I was so negative… and sure enough it WAS UP.  Actually a shockingly good month for the index as all metrics bounced back nicely. So overall a positive.  The negatives were the West and Northwest sectors being soft, so not everyone is/was celebrating.  Some of the comments from the report did point to while things seemingly stabilized, it is “harder” to get the work including the challenges on banking/financing and of course the people issue. Even in the design community labor is a challenge. Bottom line? I’ll take this bounce back and let’s keep it going!

Glass in TV 

Another TV show, more use of glass that is topical. This time it was “Class of 09” on Hulu. So far not a bad show, not great (only halfway through, so staying hopeful) but glass had some big roles. Early on, bird friendly made an appearance when a poor bird died after striking the glass, and that played a role in the story, and then later we had some very high-quality bullet resistant in play.

I joked last year that Tom Donovan of Thompson IG wrote an episode of Ozark that had thermochromic glass and now I am sure he wrote on this episode since he’s heavy into both bird and BR products. Really need to get Tom to get my podcast playing in the background in the next thing he writes! Anyway, I will say it was nice to see the BR be real and effective and show bird friendly glass would make a difference!

 No blog next week

Last this week…. No blog next week as I am taking it off as a part of the Independence Day holiday in the US. Obviously if big news breaks I’ll get it out there but otherwise please enjoy the 4th  of July, stay safe, and get ready to finish the 2nd half of the year strong. And one note, if you are shooting off fireworks please think of your neighbors, try and do it early and get 'em over with quick. Thank you.  

Links of the week