Shed Brand Studios: One of Charlotte’s Last Glass Artisans

In 1987, notorious televangelist Jim Bakker was arrested, and his PTL Television Network was shut down. The ordeal was ingrained in the national consciousness. But the Knight family was focused on what the heck they were going to do with the more than 100 stained-glass windows they’d just finished for Bakker’s Fort Mill compound.

They decided to put them out in front of their artisanry shop, Shed Brand Studios—at West Morehead Street and Grandin Road, in the building that’s now home to Bicycle Sport Uptown. They hoped a few would sell.

“We advertised them as PTL windows,” says Shaylor Knight, who was 15 at the time. “We sold them all within a week.” He chuckles and recalls his dad, Marvin, saying, “Damn, if I’d known they were gonna sell like that, we’d have made more!”

Shaylor’s grandparents Suzy and Roy Knight and their son, Marvin, started Shed Brand Studios together in 1969, in a shearing shed they rented from sheep farmers. They made a living as self-taught artisans of ceramics, candle-making, woodworking, and glasswork—mostly stained- and beveled-glass suncatchers and lamps. When Marvin married Ellie, she joined, too. In 1972, Shed Brand Studios moved out of its namesake shed and into the storefront in Wesley Heights. Marvin and Ellie expanded Shed Brand’s glasswork to include windows and doors. In 1988, they moved again—into their current studio and showroom on Iverson Way in South End, across from Lowe’s.

Today, Shaylor runs the family business. He began helping build windows around age 12. Now 52, he belongs to an increasingly rare group of glass artisans with his level of experience and expertise.(Marvin and Ellie, in their late 80s, have retired, though Ellie still makes pottery to sell in the studio showroom.)

The Knights hang a few of the finished pieces from the workshop ceiling.

 “I call him ‘Italian-style,’” his wife, Natalie Bork Knight, says. She’s a contemporary fine artist herself, and a former art teacher at Charlotte Country Day School. She’s now a lead designer at Shed Brand and helps run the business. “See, the Italians that learn a trade laugh at Americans because we feel like we have to get all these credentials and degrees to demonstrate the quality of our work.” Italian tradespeople, she continues, improve their trade through practice. The Knight family has done the same, she says, and the skills Shaylor has acquired can’t just be learned in a classroom.

“I mean, you can either do the work or you can’t,” Shaylor says with a shrug. “That’s what it comes down to.” He’s a stoic straight-shooter, the inverse of animated and talkative Natalie. (Under the “experience” section of his Linked-In profile, Shaylor has simply typed, “Everything.”)

He has all kinds of stories from growing up in the family business: helping his dad and granddad pull Tiffany-glass windows from dumpsters around Charlotte after churches opted to tear them out rather than repair them; making brass-and-leaded-glass doors for the Mecklenburg County Courthouse; restoring portions of the historic Morrocroft estate, including its roof tiles and the sunroom’s 200-year-old glass windows from Germany. They twice fixed an unusual, Irish-made door in Rí Rá Irish Pub after patrons drunkenly punched out the glass. (The second time, they used tempered glass, so the next time someone punched it, he broke his hand but not the glass.)

The Knights hand-sketch the template for each project

As one of the last glass artisans of his caliber, Shaylor and Shed Brand Studios have no shortage of work. He’s honed the business to focus on “finer wood and glasswork,” like doors, entryways, windows, window jambs, tabletops, cabinet glass, mirrors, backsplashes, glass domes, and skylights. Ninety-five percent of its clients today, Shaylor says, are in North Carolina. About 90% of their work is from scratch, and the rest involves restoration. If a Charlotte-area church has stained-glass windows, there’s a good chance at least one generation of the Knight family has worked on it. He and Natalie now also offer stained- and fused-glass workshops.

Shed Brand has eight employees who help Shaylor and Natalie, though Shaylor oversees every project himself. They wish they had more. “Nobody knows how to do trades anymore,” Shaylor says. “Not even simple woodworking. We have to train everybody who comes in here these days. We’re very lucky with the employees we do have. … Still, we’re so overloaded right now, I don’t know if we could keep up with any more. And we wouldn’t want to risk a decrease in quality.”

Piles of rolled-up, hand-drawn designs for clients form a mountain under the big wooden drafting table in Shed Brand Studios’ office. There are finished projects, like a stained-glass window of a duck, on display while waiting to be picked up. In the back workshop, windows and glass lampshades hang from wooden rafters. Pieces of a partially finished glass dome are piled on a carpeted workbench, and an employee uses pliers to cut pea-sized shards from a sheet of dark-blue glass. Sheets of all colors and textures of glass stand in old, wooden organizers around the perimeter of the room, like oversized, fragile library books.

“This business is really a historic landmark itself,” Natalie says, “and I think people realize that.”

But will there be a fourth generation of Shed Brand Studios? 

Shaylor and Natalie say they won’t pressure their 12-year-old son, Eli, to join the business, but like his father before him, he’s growing up surrounded by the work.

“Yeah, I mean, I had Eli in here when he was a baby,” Shaylor says. 

“He had a playpen in the middle of the workshop,” Natalie says with a laugh. “When he was a toddler, I remember one time someone being so worried seeing him back there sorting through a bin of purple glass. I’ll never forget that. But I couldn’t keep him out of it!

“Eli does think about it,” Natalie adds. “Last summer, we were on the way to summer camp, and he was super quiet in the back seat. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and he sighed and said, ‘I’m just thinking about the business …’”