|  We were thinking about this issue five years ago while making the decision to build our own studio: a modern, dynamic, well equipped smithy. Having determined our various gifts and talents we came to the conclusion that, provided we worked really hard, we would soon not have any competitors in the market of high- quality, designer, interior accessories of exceptional artistic merit, here in St. Petersburg.
We probably treated our business too romantically. But, frankly speaking, our only desperate desire was to get the freedom to choose the ways of implementing our projects. In the end we had the cost of sorrowful maturity, compromises and losses.
 First of all it turned out that, regardless of our expectations, there were nowhere near enough people who wanted to buy accessories of “exceptional artistic merit and quality”, certainly not nearly enough to maintain such a small, but energy and technique-intensive, factory such as ours. Meanwhile, a smithy cannot stay without work – even routine work – because it is harmful to its mechanisms and workers. Besides, making long iron fences is undoubtedly more profitable for a smithy’s prosperity than the delicate and slow formation of an exclusive railing or fireplace set. How to reach a compromise between quality, speed, and simplicity; how to get through this bottle neck without hurting your own dignity and ruining the workshop’s reputation?
Many things here depend on the contact with the customer: in our business he or she is a competent person and an important participant in the creative process – an inexorable tool of the natural selection in our professional evolution. It is him who expresses his opinion quite straightforwardly against a three-point scale – “I want”/ “I don’t want”/ “I want, but can’t have” – making us alter the project over and over again. As a rule, a customer (whether it is the future user or a designer) is, from the very start, concentrated on the problem of not exceeding the budget for this particular “luxury”. He gets scared when he sees elaborate ornaments, tin or bronze, not realizing that sometimes making something bad and making something good can be equally difficult and expensive. In this case, it is better to get back down to earth, refuse to innovate and get down to business, finding comfort in the irreproachable quality of the work.
And yet, every time we get an interesting and complicated task, it is hard to resist the temptation to treat it with passion, like the first time; to invent and search, draw the project in detail and languish for creative search. “Great God, make him love it from the first sight – isn’t it obvious how beautiful it is! Save us from any squabbling and dawdling. Then I will be happy to watch how this sketch is turned into an object. You never know whether it will look like the sketch in the end. And with this money we could buy some new equipment for the smithy, and there will be some more left over…”
Sometimes it helps, but not often, and then the sketch goes to a folder called “Projects”. In this kunstkamera you could find various patterns frozen at different stages: the bed of a cherry tree with brass stars and a built-in mechanism; a forged door for a stove, covered in little and large frogs; a Moroccan lace railing; dozens of fantastic sketches. It is sometimes sad and pleasant to browse this treasure, wipe invisible dust off the drafts and think hard about why is it they have not been used.
But for now, having signed a draft of an unpretentious fence, we sigh once again, recalling our Sensitive and Knowledgeable Customers…
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