1 (415) 209-6939

Our History

It was in 1950 when Bernhard Koziol, the founder of the German company Koziol, was driving through the snow covered Odenwald area on a cold winter’s night and got stuck in a high snow bank. Everything was quiet. He looked around and saw through the back oval window of his VW beetle a most beautiful sight.

Bernhard Koziol was presented with a fascinating sight. Snow flakes danced in the air, three deer came out of the forest covered with snow. The snow was falling softly on top of them. This sight inspired Bernhard Koziol to create the first snow globe in the world.

His first globes were of deer in a winter scene. When the snow flakes slowly fall to the bottom in the his globes you can think back to Bernhard Koziol’s trip. More than 60 years have gone by since his exciting trip in the beetle.

  Now, when you think of snow globes, you have to think about the figures that go into the globes. It turns out that Bernhard was a master carver in the old German tradition and took the sights he saw in the back window of his car and turned them into a company that is still in business today. While they do not produce the same globes of the old days (mostly trendy housewares now) they are on the web here.

Meanwhile, our little company grew from the original Martin Meyer Imports Many years ago we purchased the rights and most of the inventory from Martin and Edith and it took years of research to really understand what we purchased. We rebuilt the business around the  German Glitter and tried to sell the other items where we could. After years of research I have put the pieces together on the sources of many of the items we call “embellishments” or “German Miniatures”.

You see, back in the day (60’s through the 90’s) Martin purchased huge amounts of product from Germany, mostly miniatures and one of the vendors he purchased from was Koziol. While I do not think he ever imported the Snow Globes, he did buy thousands of the figures used in the Koziol Globes. These were very detailed, very precious figures, from hand carved molds.

 When we took over this area of the Martin Meyer Imports product line, we ended up with thousands and thousands of deer, horses, people, trees, on and on and on!

If you look thought our miniature shoppe you will see the many Snow Globe Figures we still have in stock. But, the story only gets better…. Now these figures are being used in Mixed Media Art, Scrapbooking (many of them are flat on one side, perfect for scrapbooks!) and other crafts projects.