You’re early to Glass Man Standing – to borrow a phrase I keep seeing innovating creators use to clue in their fledgling internet audiences.
The Glassmith’s toddling game show is still learning to walk. But, with the mutant grace of a poly-limbed creature bong whose many-eyed visage I was introduced to at their live taping two weeks ago, it’s finding the ground under its feet. The competition show, everyone involved tells me, was born out of a love for the glassblowing scene, for which Austin is apparently something of a hub. Seconds into their Tuesday night livestream I realize I don’t know how much I don’t know about glassblowing. Turns out, if you’re early to the art form as a whole, this head shop is the right place to be.
Employees and friends, glassblowers and fans, eagerly answer my millions of questions and define words like “frit” – the grainy mixture of silica and fluxes which fuse to become glass, and “electrum” – a metallic frit blend of silver and gold. Their enthusiasm for the fiery art and the Glassmith’s community is as palpable in the air as the fragrant smoke.
The show’s concept is familiar – 20-minute rounds of themed competition pit two glassblowers against each other in a race to impress a small panel of judges, which varies week to week. Think Blown Away, the 2019 Netflix glassblowing tournament series, but down and dirty; quicker, producing small, mostly solid sculptural pieces. Episodes are themed, with surprise specifications dictated by a large spinning wheel: gain two minutes, say, or you must use electrum. Streamed live on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook, the roughly four-hour-long episodes are later chopped into bite-sized rounds for individual release on YouTube. Each season concludes with a tournament. Season 3 wrapped on Nov. 4, crowning Cory Martin champion. Season 4 will gather the game show’s budding audience back around the blowtorch.
Billy Marsden, the entrepreneuring head shop owner who has swiftly transformed his mobile stand into a bustling triad of glass and THCA-slinging shops across Austin, chimes in for the episode’s beginning and end. Part of his vision for the Glassmith was to house a glassblowing studio in each new location. On Airport, the idea took off. Free classes and longer lesson series, plus flexible workshop time, has lured experienced artists and glass-curious creators into the space.
“I was going to sell my equipment before I started coming here,” says Frankie Esquer, who creates glassworks under the name Nostalgia. “There have been so many techniques around here and people uplifting each other, throwing each other techniques to make their game sharper,” he says. “It has given a life back to something that was being taken for granted as an art.” He drives up from San Antonio to participate in the competition and mingle with fellow blowers. Whatever inspiration he’s found at the Austin smoke shop seems to resonate with the judges; Nostalgia won five out of six rounds of the Halloween-themed episode I witnessed.
The two-person studio at the shop’s Airport location first sparked the broadcast neurons for Marsden and fellow experienced glassblower Kurt Fischer, aka @kurtooglass. The Glassmith team filmed a conversational podcast for a couple of years, but creating glassworks for the camera felt like an exciting new angle. The duo started out competing against each other. Local artists, like Indo Glass, expressed interest and, over the last six months, Glass Man Standing was born. They placed microphones and stools on the other side of the workshop’s protective glass for commentary, forming an open-to-the-audience streaming space where hosts trade quips with a Great British Bake Off-meets-SportsCenter energy, under the guidance of Josiah “jboxglass” Leonard.
For as many online viewers as the show brings in, there are arguably an equal amount of in-person attendees crowding the storefront and surrounding patio on the night I visit. Pizza boxes sit stacked in a corner, employees and friends bounce around the production team, trying to get an angle on the action or squeeze their one-liner into the competition commentary.
“It’s really an art to be able to sit down and talk with somebody and keep that going, especially for up to six hours,” Leonard tells me, gesturing to the lingering post-wrap crowd, still pretty active when the host sits down with me after nearly four hours of taping. The energetic twentysomething juggles joints and guest hosts, judges, and the inside knowledge of the niche art form.
When he started commentating, Leonard himself didn’t know much about blowing. “It was pop culture conversations and things like that, surface level conversations, and Billy, our owner, was like, ‘Hey, man, if you’re going to do commentary, you got to know what you’re talking about.’”
Marsden is eager to get anyone behind the torch. His employees, a devoted, tight-knit bunch just as often found hanging around the shop as working in it, were the first to try. For everyone I talked to, working in a head shop was a gateway drug to glassblowing.
“Not that I didn’t care about glass [before], but [I didn’t] understand it,” says Tanna Rutherford, a photographer who initially started at the Glassmith as their social media manager. “Then I just realized how much the other people cared about it and seeing how much artists really put their own time into learning.” Rutherford describes herself as a “baby glassblower.”
On Tuesdays, she serves as Leonard’s on-the-ground hosting counterpoint, stepping into the jack-and-jill workshop, microphone in hand, to interview the competitors about their creations and guide the taping. Her poised bubbliness eases the audience through the show’s routine, and cuts through the light hum of chaos.
Onscreen, and behind the protective window in person, regular competitors like Fargo and Lotboy bend heated tubes into animals and animated characters, or icons and symbols for headier themes like season 3, episode 4’s “memories.”
“It is super intense,” Fischer says, enumerating the thousand-degree flames and delicate, peculiar nature of glass forming. “Seeing it in this format where you’re in a head shop and it’s both really intense and yet feels casual in a different way, I just don’t see glassblowing approached [like this] anywhere else.”
This article appears in November 14 • 2025.