A 100 kg European Sapphire Boule at W3+ Fair Jena

If you walked past Hall 2 at W3+ Fair Jena on 23 or 24 September, you probably saw Sebastian Löslein standing next to a lump of clear crystal roughly the size of a carry-on suitcase. That was ours.

Sebastian runs SAPPHCOM | Sapphire Competence, our exclusive distribution partner for the EU, and he has spent more than fifteen years helping companies specify and source synthetic sapphire. For two days he and his colleague Markus Pavlekovic used our 100 kg Kyropoulos boule as the centrepiece of their booth. Sebastian also brought a few live demonstrations of what sapphire can take. People kept coming back to watch.

“It was a real eyecatcher! I’m glad we did this [bring the sapphire boule]. I think most people here have only seen sapphire that is already cut in blanks and windows. Now they know where it comes from! I think we should bring one next time, too!” Said Sebastian.

Why haul 100 kg of sapphire to a trade fair?

Because almost nobody has seen one.

Plenty of engineers specify sapphire windows or blanks every year. Very few have stood next to the crystal those parts are cut from. A boule this size is what industrial sapphire growth actually looks like before anything is sliced, and it tends to start conversations that a datasheet never would.

It also makes a point that's hard to get across in a brochure. This crystal was grown in Europe. So were the parts that will come out of it.

Who stopped by

Pretty much everyone. Optical engineers. Buyers from precision manufacturing and photonics. Visitors from well outside Germany. And a lot of students, who mostly wanted to know how you grow a single crystal that big and how long it takes. (2 weeks, for the record.)

Then there was the touching. We hadn't planned for it, but a steady line of visitors wanted to put a hand on the boule. Some did it for luck. One comment on our LinkedIn post summed up the mood: touch the sapphire and make a wish. Sebastian, to his credit, let them.

Grown here, and processed here too

The question we heard most was some version of: can I actually buy this in Europe? Yes.

Falcon Sapphire grows monocrystalline sapphire by the Kyropoulos method in Ventspils, Latvia. We currently produce 300 kg per month and are scaling toward 1,000 kg per month in 2027. But growing is only half of it. We also process the crystal ourselves. Every boule is 3D scanned for defects, then cored, sliced, ground and finished in-house into cylinders, blanks, optical windows, prisms and custom parts to drawing.

That matters if you're trying to move sapphire sourcing closer to home. One company, one supply chain, inside the EU, traceable from the melt to the part on your bench.

Talk to SAPPHCOM

If you're sourcing sapphire in Germany or elsewhere in the EU, Sebastian and his team are the people to call. They handle specification, feasibility, prototyping and series supply, and they can bring Falcon Sapphire material into your project.

SAPPHCOM | Sapphire Competence (Löslein Solutions GmbH) Email: info@sapphcom.de Phone: +49 911 56923071 · Mobile: +49 176 27855486 Web: sapphcom.de Book a call with Sebastian: calendly.com/s-loeslein

For anything about our crystal growth and processing directly, you can also reach Falcon Sapphire at info@falconsapphire.com or through our contact page.

And if you missed the boule in Jena, don't worry. We're already arguing about which exhibition gets it next.