A Brief Introduction

Yasemin Teke Arslan
(Founder & Creative Director)

I was born the same year with our oldest company in 1986. When I graduated high-school in 2004, I immediately started working, a workaholic of a workaholic’s daughter. Since then, I’m the manager of Teka Color which is our largest company. I studied literature in university. And then I had my MBA degree. I adopted a Persian cat in 2015, married to my husband who was my customer, in 2016. Had a daughter in 2019. Same year I established Leone di Fiume, which literally translates my daughter’s name in Italian. I’m the creative mind behind our brand.

 

Chronicle History of Parent Company

The history began when Musa Teke started working as an employee in the glass sector in 1961 when he was just 15.

After decades of experience, he started his own company, Teka Color, which supplies coatings and raw materials to the glass and ceramics industry.

In 2011 he finally gave life to his childhood dream and established Safir Cam (Sapphire Glass). Safir Cam manufactures mouth-blown glass, crystal quality but lead-free.

Our love for glass does not end here, in 2015 we joint ventures with my then-fiance who owned a glass decorator company passed from his father too and established Aurum Glass which decorates glass using different techniques.

November 30, 2019, on my birthday, after a year of designing, we started our first brand in retail, Leone di Fiume. To raise awareness to glass art, to encourage young generation to work in glass industry and to show the world our form of art.

 

Disappearing Arts

The technique that Safir Cam uses is called "mouth blowing" which is a fully handmade and labor intensive process which requires decades of expertise and precision to shape molten glass, cut it with scissors, sometimes attaching a handle or opening a spout.

This is important because we are producing an "art", not a "product" because it takes the “expert” 's life, literally decades to master the technique of mouth blowing.

Unfortunately, this form of art is not appreciated enough and there are no interns or assistants are growing up to be the "experts". This is a dying technique and is being replaced by automated technology.

Another dying technique that we use is cutting the glass with diamond blades which is the only substance that is tough enough to cut glass.

Real experts cut and shape the glass with such precision, but again, there are no interns are growing up and the experts getting older.

 

Gender Equality

We support women and we are a 99% female owned company with many high positioned female workers including our production manager, accounting manager and her assistants, designer and graphic designer, many decorators who color the glass and so on.

 

Protect What We Already Have

We care for the environment, that's why we don't use lead in our crystal quality glass.

We also only use soy bean oil as our wax and never use paraffin, which is a petroleum by-product. Soy wax is sustainable, renewable and biodegradable. It's also a completely new and growing market for farmers.

Soy and other vegetable waxes have a clean, soot free burn. Soot are small carcinogen particles that will be released when burning petro-carbon products, like paraffin. Soot will also compromise the air quality in your home if your home is not ventilated sufficiently. Soy candles have a denser molecular structure, making them burn longer than paraffin.