So You Want To Be A Pot Dealer

This is part one in a short series of articles about selling your pottery. Glass & Stone Pottery Studio will be offering student, member, and staff pieces for sale - but even with the studio's assistance and support, there's a lot to consider before you begin.

Making Products for Sale

Members and students at Glass & Stone Pottery Studio know that my staff and I are always going to be supportive of their work and the exploration of new techniques, art styles, and challenges. Jumping into pottery as an art, a hobby, an exploration of skill and craft - that's hard, and demanding, and you deserve all the praise and admiration of your courage and determination to do those things.

When you want to sell your work, different rules have to apply. It's no longer just about your experience and growth and satisfying the human drive to be creative; now it's all that and the customer's need to receive fair value and a quality product. So if you want to make pottery for sale, you have to be making something worth selling.

Quality

Your pieces need to be durable, well-made, and fit for purpose. You can't expect a customer to be happy buying a bowl that has pitted glaze, cracks in the foot, or weighs twice what it should. Pieces that would have been perfectly fine to you before now have to be discarded as failures or discounted as seconds.

Which means you need to be much more confident in your skill and much more discriminating in whether or not a piece is acceptable, and much more willing to throw out a piece that doesn't meet that standard. The earlier in the process a failed piece is discarded, the better.

So if you're thinking about selling your work, start looking closely at the things you're producing. How thick are the walls? How smoothly do your fingers run over the surfaces? Do your glazed surfaces come out smooth and shiny?

Learning to produce salable work is a challenge, and no one will make you take it on. You have to decide for yourself that it's what you want. If it is, ask us for critique; we'll help you practice and refine your skills to get the quality you need.

Consistency

Products made for sale need to be consistent. It's not enough for bowls to be well-made and high quality - they also need to stack together well, present as a set when placed on a table, and be something a customer can purchase knowing their new bowl will comfortably match the one they bought last week.

This doesn't mean you have to make everything identical - but you need to be able to make items that are repeatable. Start by getting better at taking notes and recording your work. Carry a notebook, and record not just clay types and glaze combinations, but exact dimensions before and after firing, weights of clay, sketch out your shapes and profiles. Measure everything; you need to know how big the base of that bowl is, and then think about how to make it that size again.

Throwing gauges or sticks help by giving you a fixed reference point. But they only give you a point - does the wall curve in or out to get there? How fast? Is it a sharp shoulder, or a curve? You can use tools to help, especially shaped rigid ribs and kidneys, but it's best not to depend entirely on them - tools break, but more importantly, how you hold and use the tool matters as much as the shape. A tool you have to hold in precisely the right way to get the desired result isn't better for you than learning to control the shape with your fingers and a generic rib - it's just going to limit your options.

The single most important factor in developing this skill set is practice and repetition. Use a one-pound ball of House Blend and throw a small bowl; something you'd use as a finger bowl or for dipping sauce. Then set it where you can see it clearly from the wheel, and throw ten more just like it. When you're done, go through all ten - how good are they? How well do they match your model? Where are the issues - did you struggle with size? Are the rims different profiles? What about the curve from foot to rim?

Most potters develop a basic set of forms - their standard bowl, mug, pitcher, etc. When they set out to make them for production, they'll eventually refine the process down to a minimum set of moves - one pull to do this, move the rim that way, then shape the belly with this rib... The more you can turn the process of throwing that shape into a set of repeatable steps, the easier it will be to make consistent, high-quality pieces.

Quantity

Finally, making pots for sale is a numbers game. You have to make enough pots to always be able to offer something to a customer; it feels great to sell out your entire inventory, but you need to be ready for the next event, the next sale, the next customer.

How many pots can you throw in a studio session? Two? Three? Five? Did you read the bit above about throwing ten bowls and think "I can't do that!"? The thing is, you can - you just mostly don't need to. But if you're going to sell your work, you do need to, and often.

Partly that's because in the early stages you're going to throw out a lot more of your work. You need to be very firm about the pots you keep putting energy into finishing; if it's not acceptable quality, toss it in the bucket and make another one. And that needs to be easy for you; you can't be invested in a piece that isn't right, you can't be dismayed at mustering the energy to throw another one.

Start stretching and checking in with yourself before a session at the wheel. Are your shoulders tight and stiff, or loose and relaxed? Are you comfortable working at the wheel? What gets tired first, and why? Take the time to figure out the ideal position for yourself, your posture, your tools. If you find your arm or shoulders quickly get tired while throwing, think about whether you're using too much muscle instead of technique - if you're going to make a lot of pieces, you need to be able to do it quickly, but more importantly you need to be able to do it without wasting energy. Let the wheel supply the strength, and work with it - not against it.

One More Thing

We live in a world of mass-produced items. When we hear the words "consistent" and "quality" we tend to think of those - identical, precision-made products that are turned out by the thousand and are indistinguishable from one to the next.

That's not what we're talking about here.

Becoming a production potter is not about becoming a machine. You might be making items for production, but those items are still hand-made pottery. Customers expect and need quality, consistency, and quantity - but they also want that personal, individual story that comes from your hands and energy on the item they buy. It's okay - in fact, it should be a goal - for someone to pick up one of your pieces and be able to feel where your hands were as it took shape.

Because we're used to that world of precision and flawless replicas, the idea of creating consistent pieces is daunting. It doesn't have to be; let that go. If it's close enough to stack; close enough to be recognizable; close enough to function the same as another of the same item - that's consistent.

If you need to use a tool other than eyes and hands to find the flaws - you're looking way too hard for them.