It has been a quite a while now since some bottles with a special design have reached the shelves of shops in Bucharest and they simply puzzle the buyers at first sight. Many people would love to display them at home, among china ballerinas and the coffee set carefully saved since God knows what celebration.
They simply look too good to be just bottles. The bottle filled with a yellowish or reddish fluid reveals the original idea of two women of taste.
"We saw the gift items market in Romania was poor and this is where we started from," say Emilia Gruia and Iustina Cojocaru, the two founders and shareholders of Sofraro Company.
They say they established it with some $10,000 in start-up capital back in 1994, thinking they could somehow educate Romanians' taste when making presents. Moreover, the two women also thought that the tourists or the business people visiting Romania hardly had any souvenirs to take back home from here.
They set up a glass workshop, which employs six people at the moment, but the company works with other workshops when it cannot fill all the orders. "This is a field with very few "skills", which manufactures very low stocks," Iustina Cojocaru says.
"Anyway, you know how it is. The glass breaks, the workers blow too hard and the bottle gets a little bumpy, so that we can't keep an exact track of how many bottles we actually make."
Special models, made for special occasions or to order, are tested, too. "We have regular clients, which have been coming to us for the past two or three years. We're trying to keep those we already have," Iustina Cojocaru explains. The clients have their peculiarities and demands. For instance, when Europa FM Radio was launched last year, they were asked to make a bottle that looked like a microphone.
"We once had a Korean come in and ask for bottles to mimic positions during sexual intercourse, for a series that was to be called "the loving couple," Emilia Gruia adds.
"But those many transport problems and the cost of taking something out of Romania being three times higher than when exporting something from Hungary, made the Korean change his mind." So that only one item was left from that series to be, which the two ladies keep somewhere out of sight.
The price of a bottle is up to the manual labour it involves, and, in case there is an order for a more special model, only two bottles are made a day. If the model is not so intricate, the daily output reaches some 20-30 bottles.
The two ladies did not settle for making bottles only, so that, back in 1996, they came up with the idea of filling those bottles with something. This is when they starting wandering around the country in search of some good wines for their bottles.
After a lot of wandering, they stopped in Bucium, near Iasi. "We walked all over the place, researching every winemaking area in the country," they say. "One day we stopped in Bucium, where we were served some brandy right after the wine tasting session. We simply loved it, because it looked like French Calvados, so that we decided to work with them."
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