One of the founders of our company, Ms. Liwen Chen, the oldest sister of the four, Chen has worked on environmental protection since 2008. Prior to doing oversea marketing, she has devoted herself to zero waste at environmental NGOs.
In the first photo, I’m the one in the second row, second from the right, wearing a blue top. This photo was taken in February 2021, during the Chinese Spring Festival. It’s a family portrait of the four sisters and our parents. The photo was taken in the newly built house of my youngest sister and is our first ever full family photo.
Just over a month after the photo was taken, on March 20, 2021, my father suffered a stroke and was hospitalized. The stroke was very serious, with significant blockage on the right side of his brain. Even though doctors performed a thrombectomy, he had issues on the left side of his body. After 16 days in the hospital, he returned home to recover.
During that year, I traveled frequently between my workplace and hometown to accompany my father as he recuperated. Since graduating with a master’s degree in 2008, I had been working with environmental non-profit organizations until 2023. My hometown has always been an important window for me to observe the transformation of rural society in China. I’ve long paid attention to issues such as agricultural production, the environmental changes, education, and women’s rights in rural areas. However, I had paid relatively little attention to local industrial development. While caring for my father in 2021, I began to understand the changes in production and daily life in my hometown through the lives of my three sisters.
I was born in the early 1980s in a village in Hebei Province, China. My parents mainly raised the four of us daughters through agricultural farming. Having grown up helping my parents in the fields, I know firsthand how grueling semi-mechanized agriculture was in China during the 1980s and 1990s. They worked year-round, with only a few days off during the Spring Festival.
After 2000, with China’s economic development and the gradual spread of highly mechanized agriculture across the Hebei Plain, farming no longer required as much manual labor. After finishing middle school and not continuing their education, my younger sisters left for the cities to work for a few years. After 2000, they gradually got married and returned to the village where we were born and raised. Given that farming could no longer sustain a livelihood, only my second younger sister’s family managed to get by through her husband’s skills in auto repair. My eldest and youngest sisters and their husbands worked in glass handicraft factories in the village.
In 2021, while taking care of my father at home, I began paying more attention to my younger sisters’ lives. I realized that, unlike our parents’ generation who depended on farming, my sisters’ material living conditions had improved significantly. Thanks to the local hand-blown glass industry, they didn’t need to migrate to the cities for work, and their children weren’t left behind as “left-behind children.” In the second photo, the six children belong to my three sisters—each has one daughter and one son.
In addition to my sisters and their husbands working in the village’s handblown glass factories, my mother, who is in her late sixties, also works in the local glass factory doing packaging. In rural China, elderly people over 60 receive only 100 yuan ($14) a month in pension, which is barely enough to cover basic needs. Without the glass industry, my parents’ income from farming alone would not be enough to live on. The existence of the hand-blown glass industry has provided them with a relatively stable source of income.
It’s not just my family—about 90% of the young people in our village work in handblown glass factories. Some have more than 20 years of experience and can create all kinds of glass products. They make a living and support their families through this work. This industry has allowed me to see the possibility for the rural society where I grew up to move toward a better future.
Why We Founded The Sisters’ Glass
While accompanying my father through his recovery in 2021, I had the opportunity to learn more about the changes in my hometown over the past two decades, including the history and current state of the hand-blown glass industry. My hometown lies on the border between Hejian City and Xian County in Cangzhou, Hebei Province. In the 1960s, the craft of hand-blown glass emerged in neighboring Hejian, initially producing laboratory glassware using high borosilicate glass, known for its heat resistance.
After 2000, with China’s rapid economic development, the focus shifted to household glassware such as teapots and coffee utensils. This industry gradually expanded to surrounding villages, including our area in Xicheng Township, Xian County. Today, the coffee and tea ware produced here is exported globally. These artisans can craft nearly all types of heat-resistant glass products for everyday use—various cups, pots, coffee-making tools, wine glasses, and tea sets.
In the latter half of 2021, my eldest and youngest sisters’ families established their own hand-blown glass workshops. With over a decade of experience in the craft, my sisters and their husbands had mastered the techniques and stages of production: my youngest sister specializes in forming techniques like thread-pulling and flaring, my eldest sister attaches handles, her husband forms the body of the glass items, and my youngest sister’s husband shapes the spouts. My mother, who had been packaging glassware for many years, joined to help with packing. Together, they could produce nearly any type of heat-resistant glass product.
My sisters’ work represents the most essential part of the industry: the actual production. In our township alone, there are over 60 hand-blown glass enterprises. After interviewing more than a dozen of them, I found that the biggest challenge they all face is a complete lack of sales channels. As my sisters have often said, they are capable of making almost any product from high borosilicate glass. About 70% of their products are exported and have served many well-known global brands such as Bodum and Breville. Their glassware is beautiful and high-quality, but by the time orders reach them, they have already passed through three, sometimes even five or six layers of subcontracting. Despite doing the most difficult work, they receive less than 10% of the profit. Over 90% of the profits are taken by trading companies and other middlemen.
In recent years, as China’s economy has slowed, profits have dropped even further—and sometimes there are no orders at all. Now, they work only about half the week. With such thin profit margins, my sisters can’t even afford basic pension contributions. Because more than 90% of local factories are at the bottom of the glass industry chain, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain basic production. As a result, large-scale unemployment has begun to emerge over the past two years.
Growing up in a family with only daughters, I witnessed and experienced firsthand the deep-rooted gender bias and preference for sons in rural society. Yet, in the past two decades, the rise of the hand-blown glass industry has allowed women to gain financial independence through their own labor. They’ve begun to break free from the male-dominated agricultural economy and now enjoy greater freedom and rights both at home and in society.
Among the four of us sisters, I am the only one who attended university—the only person in three generations of our extended family to receive higher education. In 2021, as I learned more about the challenges facing the local glass industry and my sisters’ role in it, I began thinking about how I could help. In 2022, when my work in waste sorting at an environmental NGO was met with setbacks and became unsustainable, I started helping my sisters register a company. We named it Sisters’ Hand-Blown Glassware, or The Sisters’ Glass in English.
We chose the name “Sisters” not only because I hope we, as sisters, can continue to grow the hand-blown glass tradition together, but also because I hope to unite more glass producers in our hometown into a shared sales platform. With my language skills and over a decade of work experience, I want to support their craftsmanship and help bring our hometown’s handmade glass products to a global market—keeping more profits in the village. This way, locals can enjoy better incomes, sustained economic development, improved women’s economic independence and rights, a healthier environment, and better education for children.
The people in our village have built up more than 20 years of expertise in glassblowing. I hope this local craft can develop sustainably, continue providing employment, and offer livelihoods to most villagers. Women can have economic independence through their skills, parents can stay with their children, and elders can be cared for by their families.
What I Want to Do, and How I’ll Do It
In early July 2024, after returning to my hometown from a ten-month visiting scholar program at the University of California, Davis, I began to notice many abnormal behaviors in my father, such as the loss of recent memories. After more than six months of medical consultations and treatments, it became clear that he is suffering from frontotemporal dementia. From being unable to accept his diagnosis, to gradually coming to terms with it, I have started to adjust my life and career plans. While my father can still take care of himself and recognize his loved ones, I want to stay by his side as much as possible and try to slow the progression of his illness.
Over the past three years, I have been closely following the hand-blown glass industry in my hometown. Now that I have returned to live here, it is the right time to start working with the local people and embark on the second chapter of my professional life. In recent years, watching my parents and my sisters live their lives with such determination and hope for a better future has helped me truly grasp the meaning of life. Their resilience and drive inspire me deeply. Working together with my family has not only brought us closer but has also become a powerful new source of purpose and energy in my own journey. After decades of rapid economic growth, rural China—including my hometown—is now facing serious sustainability challenges. Going forward, I plan to work with skilled local artisans in glassblowing and use business as a way to explore sustainable development.
To achieve this, the first step is to focus on the most basic task: sales. I aim to showcase the professionalism and craftsmanship of these women in handmade glass production, helping my sisters and other local factories find outlets for their work and enabling each one to shine in their areas of specialty.
In the longer term, building on the unique properties of heat-resistant borosilicate glass—and drawing from my decade-plus of experience in environmental work—I hope we can eventually design glass products that replace single-use plastic. These alternatives could serve as healthier, more sustainable containers for coffee, tea, and other food-related uses, contributing to better human and environmental health.
If you have a need for borosilicate heat-resistant glassware, please contact me. Let’s work together to create more good quality and sustainable glass products!
We have glass tumblers as alternatives to plastic boba packaging, double-walled glass cups for take-away coffee etc. Our dream is to work closely with chain boba and coffee stores to design reusable glass ware to replace single-use plastics, and take action to reduce carbon emission.