Real neon is glass. A tube gets heated over a flame, bent by hand into the shape of your letter, sealed, pumped down to vacuum, filled with neon or argon, and wired to a transformer. It takes years to learn and it can't be automated. That's why almost nobody does it anymore.

Most of what gets sold as "neon" today is LED rope in a silicone sleeve — a flexible strip bent around a plastic backing. It's cheap, it ships from overseas, and from ten feet away in a photo it looks close. In a room it doesn't. Glass has depth and a specific quality of glow that a diode behind plastic doesn't reproduce, which is why it still photographs the way it does after ninety years.

We bend glass in our own shop in Englewood. Our own fires, our own bombarder, our own pump and gas. We've been doing it since 2003, and there's one other shop in Denver doing comparable work.

What people order

Bar and taproom pieces — logos, taglines, "OPEN," room markers. Retail window signs. Wall pieces for restaurants and studios. Wedding and event signs. Home pieces, which have become a large share of what we make.

Almost anything you can draw, we can bend. Script and cursive work particularly well because a glass tube is a continuous line — that's what it wants to be. Very tight interior corners and fine detail are where the medium pushes back, and we'll tell you during design if your artwork is fighting the glass rather than working with it.

Color

Color comes from the gas and the glass itself, not from a filter. Neon gas gives you the classic red-orange. Argon with mercury in colored tubing gives you the blues, greens, pinks and purples. Each color is a different piece of glass, so a multi-color piece is genuinely several signs' worth of bending — that's what drives the price, not the size.

How long it lasts

Decades. There are neon signs still burning that were made before the Second World War. When something does eventually fail it's usually the transformer or a single tube, and both are repairable — we repair and repump glass, including signs other shops made. An LED sign that fails is thrown away.

Sizing

Small pieces start at $450 — a word, a short phrase, single color. Medium at $660. Large feature pieces at $950 and up. Price follows the amount of bending and the number of colors more than the overall dimensions, so a simple wide sign can cost less than a small complicated one.

Send us a sketch, a logo, or even a description. We'll tell you honestly whether it works in glass, and what it takes.