Crystal Cave in Wilmette transforms itself in move to Glenview

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Wilmette, 01/30/12 Josef Puehringer (right), president of The Crystal Cave, assists Shirley Latham (center) and her mother Rachelli Janssen of Chicago look through the collection at the store Jan. 30. | Curtis Lehmkuhl~Sun-Times Media

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Updated: March 11, 2012 8:27AM

After almost 44 years, artist, craftsman and businessman Josef Puehringer is bidding a bittersweet good-bye to downtown Wilmette.

Puehringer, who owns The Crystal Cave store at 1141 Central Ave., has long presided over a well-loved local source for hand-crafted crystal art pieces, glass and crystal giftware and specialized glass and crystal repair. But he will be closing his retail doors at the end of February.

Wilmette’s loss will be Glenview’s gain, however; Puehringer is moving his workshop operation to a new and spacious center at 3600 Lehigh Ave. in that community. Once renovations on the space are complete, he expects he and his staff of 10 will be moved in by March 15.

“It will be a dream location,” he said of the new quarters. “It will be a model workshop on the European model. We were very lucky to get this space.”

Wilmette’s business community will miss both the Crystal Cave and Puehringer, Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Nada Becker said.

He was one of the business owners who started what has become a tradition in Wilmette, the annual holiday parade, she said, and the store “has made downtown Wilmette so appealing with their holiday window decorations.”

The engraving work he has done for the chamber and for fellow business owners through the years also has become a tradition, she said.

“They will be terribly missed, but we wish them all the best in their new location.”

Shift explained

Puehringer took a moment Jan. 27 to talk about the business he loves and the reasons he is transforming it from a retail and custom-order business to a largely non-retail concern.

As he did, work still hummed around him in the Wilmette shop. Some of his four engravers were still working on orders, and other staff members were waiting on customers taking advantage of The Crystal Cave’s moving sale. Other customers dropped by to tell Puehringer how much they would miss being able to browse and buy in the downtown location.

The soft economy that started hitting retail sales about four years ago didn’t spare The Crystal Cave, Puehringer said. Shop sales slid “so much you don’t even want to think about it,” he said.

“We tried to keep the store and just move the workshop,” Puehringer said. “We thought we would see how we did over Christmas. If we did well, we would keep the store.

“But we didn’t do the kind of business we need to do at Christmas, and that made up our minds.”

The Crystal Cave’s corporate and custom business is successful enough to make closing the retail operation a logical move, he said. Retail customers still will be able to take advantage of the company’s website, and staff will continue to undertake repairs.

In the meantime, “Moving, But Not Too Far” signs bedeck the Wilmette store, and sale signs advertise 60 percent off many of the gorgeous crystal and glass art pieces that no longer will be part of the business’s inventory. (The Crystal Cave will now offer only crystal and glassware designed and made by Puehringer and his team.)

He is philosophical about the economics that drove his decision. Hard times have forced other small businesses and untold numbers of individuals to transform their lives and operations, or suffer bankruptcy and foreclosure, he said.

Indeed, dusty and unclaimed boxes of crystal, brought in over the past few years to his shop for repair but never reclaimed by their original owners, stand as silent proof of that, he said.

Solid relationships

Puehringer is moving, but he will always cherish the relationships he built in downtown Wilmette, which he first made his business home after relocating it from a small studio in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood.

He brought The Crystal Cave, originally called simply Glass Engraving and Glass Repair, to Wilmette only two years after coming to America himself in 1967, from his birth country of Austria.

Puehringer studied glass and crystal engraving at the Glasfachschule art glass school in that country, emigrating from Austria to take a job in the crystal department of Carson Pirie Scott & Co. in downtown Chicago.

But his desire to be more creative and to control his own destiny compelled him to strike out on his own.

“I love creativity, and I love to design, I love the challenges involved in that. Everything we do here is creative, from working out problems of how to present things to the final designs,” he said.

He has passed on many of his master artisan’s skills to the four engravers on his staff, two of whom are also master engravers.

“They are probably the only people who know how to do what they do,” he said proudly.

The Crystal Cave has expanded more than once since opening in Wilmette. Puehringer has designed engraved crystal and glass awards, gifts and art pieces for companies, organizations, institutions and individuals as diverse as Navistar, The Dallas Cowboys, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics Committee and actor Charlton Heston.

Puehringer is also proud of the art pieces he has designed to celebrate, among other things, Abraham Lincoln, one of his personal heroes; cities across America; and America itself, the adopted country he loves fiercely.

He and his team will be able to continue The Crystal Cave’s traditions in Glenview, he said.

“Am I sad to be leaving? Yes, and no. We all have to grow as things change, whether we are people or a business. Unless we change, we are out of business, so to speak,” he said.

“This is just the next step in the journey.”

For more information on The Crystal Cave, access thecrystalcave.us/.