Established in 1998, Crystal Sensations of Markham, Ontario is a world-renowned designer and manufacturer, producing stunning, eclectic, and distinctive corporate gifts, recognition and milestone awards for the promotional products industry.
An exploration of the company’s output reveals a multitude of sparkling crystal shapes, each featuring customized designs which are floating within the glass, as if created by magic—but rather created by multi-talented artists and designers using sophisticated processes, including subsurface 3D laser technology. Many of the company’s creations are further enhanced by additional processes, including deep surface etching and hand painted colour fill, whereby the artist adds colour to the etched designs, logos, and text. When customers require gradient colours to be included in their award designs, a Micro Resolution UV colour print is utilized.
It should be noted that none of the images shown on the company website are computer-generated images, but rather actual photographs of works that Crystal Sensations has designed and produced for its clients.
The numbers are impressive, with over 10,000 custom designs spanning more than 38 industries, including entertainment and media, health care and pharmaceuticals, industrial and manufacturing, financial services, government agencies, professional associations, education, real estate, and architecture, agriculture, and infrastructure and transportation business sectors.
As company President and CEO Miles Bocknek explains, “it’s not about being the biggest organization of its kind; it’s about being the best.” Crystal Sensations has achieved this by leveraging advanced technology and hiring an ultra-talented creative team that truly cares about the quality of the work they do (called the Zing Team by Director of Sales Jerome Bacchus, as they “put the ‘zing’ into amazing).” This equally applies to the artists who create for the laser applications and for the surface etching.
In a wide-ranging interview with Bocknek and Bacchus, we learn about the company’s serendipitous beginnings and how it evolved, through a commitment to excellence, into the company it is today.
In 1990, at the suggestion of his cousin, who had authored a coffee table book of images of the Earth taken from outer space, Bocknek started offering the gift book to corporations in the Toronto area. As the enterprises grew, he was offering approximately 15 different kinds of giftware, including glass and crystal awards.
“By the late ’90s,” he recalls, “when I was attending the New York Gift Show, I discovered a factory from Israel which was offering the most incredible crystal with 3D subsurface laser engraving,” (meaning the engraving was on the inside of the crystal). “It was a brand-new technology, and it was stunning,” he says.
“I immediately saw the business potential. They did not have anyone representing their line in Canada, and I became their sole Canadian representative, first offering it to my corporate clients, and then to sales agents and distributors. I quickly pivoted, changing my focus from working directly with corporate buyers to working with promotional agencies who offered branded merchandise to their clients.”
Everyone loved the engraved crystal products as much as Bocknek did, but importing the product line from overseas proved to be too costly for many businesses, given that orders were custom and had to be flown in to meet short delivery deadlines.
That didn’t mean, however, that Bocknek couldn’t continue to offer the crystal that corporate clients so admired; he just had to find a way to manufacture the subsurface laser-engraved crystals in Canada, so that they could be offered across North America more cost-effectively. Currently, as it turns out, clients all over the globe are reaching out to Crystal Sensations, some from as far away as Australia.
Searching for an industrial laser machine at that time that could replicate the fine work being done in Israel was a challenge. Bocknek traveled to Eastern Europe initially, where the technology is believed to be born, but eventually located, some months later, more sophisticated laser technology in Western Europe.
“When I went over there and saw it, I immediately knew that was the machine I was going to acquire. It was hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I was determined to arrange financing for it. I vividly recall my wife saying, ‘you are not mortgaging our house.’ I knew I was going to produce millions of dollars’ worth of awards over the years, and it only made sense to source the best technology available,” he tells us.
“A critical part of a working laser machine is the software that runs the system and allows the artist to create an engraving file from the artist’s 3D CAD work. At the time I purchased the machine, there were two options of software. One version was more advanced, and did a lot more than the basic alternative. It was complex, well engineered, but very costly. Looking back, investing in the more robust software was one of the best decisions I have ever made,” Bocknek says.
That advanced software is no longer available. It was discontinued many years ago. “Having the advanced software has its advantages. Without all of its features, the details seen in our engraving wouldn’t be as intricate,” Bocknek says.
When the laser machine arrived in Markham in January 2002, Bocknek arranged for a specialist in laser technology to come to the company facility and help them set up and calibrate the equipment. “Bringing in this individual was a game changer,” Bocknek says. “He knew everything about the system, and showed ‘why’ it worked, and thus how to extract amazing results from it. It would have taken us a lifetime to gather this knowledge about physics and laser energy,” says Bocknek. “In a few days we were shown what others probably will never acquire in decades of operating a system.”
Among the things they learned was how water temperature affects the beam quality. “There are many highly technical details I could discuss, but we’d rather the results of the work we produce speak for itself.”
One stunning example of what is possible when combining artistry with sophisticated technology is the 3D art in an award for the U.S. Marine Corps. Created by Senior Designer and Head of the Art Department, Christopher Loates, it is based on Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.”
“Christopher worked from the photograph and I think it took him several days of design time, working eight hours a day. Once the 3D image was designed in the CAD software, he then converted it to a point cloud file, a 3D image of dots. This file can then be read by the software in the laser system, which tells the laser where to place the energy bursts that create the tiny bubbles within the glass,” Bocknek explains.
Most of the awards Crystal Sensations creates take from 15 to 90 minutes to engrave once the design has been completed, “but we have done large signs for companies where we put it in a piece of float glass on a Friday night and it finishes engraving sometime the next day, which is at the extreme end of the time required for engraving,” he shares.
Although technology is at the forefront of Crystal Sensations, both Bocknek and Bacchus are “old-school” when it comes to working with clients, preferring telephone calls to emails to extract details of a project. The two agree that they like to engage clients on the phone, have dynamic and fluid conversations, and drill down on exactly what the client is looking for: how many, what price point, what style, and all the pertinent details needed to put together an offering for quoting.
“We have to work swiftly and know what we’re doing, because our product offering is not as simple as taking an ‘off-the-shelf’ cup, putting a logo on it, and sending it out,” Bocknek says. “If the crystal size and shape requested is in stock, and it’s a small quantity, we can turn around a rush order in a few days, but if someone wants a custom shaped design for hundreds or thousands of awards, we may need several months’ lead time,” he explains. “When someone tells us they want 75 awards a week from now, there are restrictions on what we can produce, but if the event is months away, we have time to plan, custom-design, and if necessary, import a specific crystal shape and bring them in by sea, as opposed to flying them in, which would make the end product unnecessarily expensive.”
Adds Bacchus, “During the consulting process, I like to share with people that we will deliver exactly what is quoted, in the timeframe we have committed to, once we know the parameters. That is something we pride ourselves on, delivering to the expectation.”
Emails do, of course, have their place in communication, because before any actual engraving or colour work is begun, artwork is exchanged, as are art proofs and art approvals, giving clients the confidence that the finished product will look exactly as ordered.
While Crystal Sensations operates on a business-to-business model, Bacchus says his thoughts are of the person no one from the company will ever see or speak to, the award’s recipient. “At the end of the day, we are delivering to the recipient who will think it is fantastic to be recognized for their accomplishment. People will display their awards for decades to come, so we put out the best quality awards we can so they will have something to cherish and be proud of,” he says.
“This is one of the reasons we continue to repeat some of the exact projects we started 10 or 15 years ago. Clients return for repeat orders and say, ‘this is our flagship award that we award people who have achieved this pinnacle or that milestone.’”
As an example, Bacchus tells us about an insurance company’s request to have Crystal Sensations design an award for the company’s top producers, who are members of the Million Dollar Round Table, which they achieve by producing a million dollars in premiums for three consecutive years. This company has been refilling the order for the last 15 years.
“These recipients are not making peanuts,” Bacchus says, “they are people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in income because of the millions they produce. I’ve been told by the distributor that the insurance company executive reports that even with all the money these recipients make, they cherish this crystal award and display them on their mantels. It’s a testament to their hard work and success.”
