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f you were watching ABC last December, you may remember seeing something unexpected: us!

As a small company, we don't often expect to be featured on national television. But one day, a few weeks before Christmas in 2022, we got a pleasant surprise. Actually, two pleasant surprises: a call and an email from ABC's World News Tonight with David Muir, inviting us onto their Made in America segment.

Every Christmas season, ABC likes to highlight several small American companies. The idea is to support small businesses and take a peek into the workshops where they make their wares, speaking with the people who do the work. So of course, we were thrilled to be asked! We love pulling back the curtain to show how we do what we do. Crafting metal by hand has always been at the heart of Danforth, and we wouldn't be here if it weren't for the hard work and extraordinary talent of our people.

That's why we scrambled to put together some video clips—even though we only had a day to do it, and this was during our busiest month of the year! We make all 150 of our ornaments by hand, right here in our Middlebury workshop. That means every step, from pouring the petwer to applying color, from engraving your special date to shipping them out, happens all under one roof. In a word, that means we're busy!

The brunt of the video work fell to Ashley, our graphic designer and a member of our product design team.

"I had one day to collect video footage showing the production process," she said. "I knew I had to go into the workshop and just start asking questions. I also wanted to showcase the design piece, since we design everything in-house and it's a big part of our process. So I picked up my iPhone and just started asking questions. What do you do? What's your day like? What have you been working on lately?" She went to the workshop and shot videos all morning, following the production process from start to finish as our "Danforth elves" created Santa's Workshops (our 2022 Annual Ornament).