Turning your hobby into a business

[ceramicjames]

Hi fellow potters, I'm a ceramicist who also works as a consultant in Sales, Marketing & Ecommerce. 

I've been speaking with several fellow potters about how best to sell work either online or at markets and thought I would use my contacts to develop some content to answer the most common questions, especially around things like pricing and social media marketing.   

I've created a 2-minute survey to ask you what problems you're facing turning your hobby into a business - please tell me some of your biggest problems so I can get you answers!  Here's the form: https://forms.gle/ZrTdApckhz1V9Qkv7

Thanks, James

Edited March 6, 2023 by ceramicjames
Link removed by moderators pending edits

[Mark C.]

You may way to expand your sales beyond online to gain traction sooner.

[GEP]

The best advice comes from people with years of first hand experience with selling. I have seen lots of second hand advice being peddled, and it always come across to me as "this person has clearly never tried the advice their peddling." Second hand advice is always over-simplified, as if the person thinks there are formulas and paved roads to follow. Those don't exist! 

[DirtRoads]

On 3/2/2023 at 4:21 PM, GEP said:

The best advice comes from people with years of first hand experience with selling. I have seen lots of second hand advice being peddled, and it always come across to me as "this person has clearly never tried the advice their peddling." Second hand advice is always over-simplified, as if the person thinks there are formulas and paved roads to follow. Those don't exist! 

^ I had 2 responses to this:   LOL (out loud) and secondly agree.   This question is ALWAYS on the board.       I'm agreeing with GEP that you have to be assured the "advisor" has actually reached financial viability in a pottery business.   

My experience (going into my 13th year) is that there seems to be very little middle ground.   Either people are successful commercially or they are not.    I've seen quite a few get started and even talked to some people in my area.   Most people don't stay  in this for the long haul.  I use a format that I see less often.   I do 2 shows a year and have a free standing location.   I have had up to 8 employees, and am now down to only 1 plus myself.     Actually I make about the same profit.   One thing I did three years ago was adding slip casted wares to my hand building pottery line.     I buy these slip cast wares from an outside source and it decreased my clay production needs.   It's a nice supplement.   Also, I have a full jewelry line that I have 1 full time employee that stays in sales area and makes jewelry and waits on customers for pottery and jewelry sales (and a small hand crafted fragrance line that I make as my "hobby").

I like this business 200x more with no employees in the production process except myself.  just got in a 4K pound drop of clay from Laguna  and will use all of it this year.   In previous years have used more than 10K pounds.   Not sure how much I will use this year ... probably will get one more 4k drop.

In answer to your question, I don't do any online.    But I've had other businesses before this and was pretty comfortable in the mechanics of establishing a destination retail business.   I am a firm believer in capturing 4th quarter gift sales.   Half my yearly sales are in Nov/Dec.  I'm not sure I'm the best example for recommending channels.    I do some consulting  but could  easily have enough clients to do retail consulting full time.   I am always going to say "retail".   But I'm not 100% sure this is a good strategy for most potters and I turn down any consulting offers for any arts and crafts businesses.    Social media, at the current time, makes it easier to drive customers to a retail location than it used to be.  (however, FB and Instagram have implemented changes and may well introduce more that limit the cost effectiveness of this promotion).  I've written an extensive analysis of channels somewhere in these forums.     I am very pleased with the financial viability and profitability of my business.   I will say the ROI (return on investment i.e. equipment, materials, location set up), is exceptionally high.    The biggest draw back is the ease and consistency  of duplication.    I see duplication more successful in slip casting than in hand building.    I've had less experience with wheel work, as I dropped it years ago to keep up with the demand for my hand built wares.     Avoid hiring employees until you have your process and sales channels worked out.  I am also going to suggest that you approach wholesaling very cautiously.   I've always thought one should choose between wholesaling and retailing.    I have done wholesale in my jewelry line but have stopped because it was pulling me in 2 directions.

Cheers.   Hope I get to see the survy.

Sharon Grimes/Dirt Roads Pottery

 

Edited March 7, 2023 by DirtRoads

[ceramicjames]

Thanks for all your contributions, guys.  I've re-added the form here: https://forms.gle/ZrTdApckhz1V9Qkv7 (it got removed because of some issues). 

Really interesting to hear from people who have years of experience doing this; also keen to hear from people who are just setting out on their ceramics journey as I understand it can be quite intimidating / unclear where to start. 

[suetectic]

With all due respect, insert disrespectful comment, the most successful people right now are instagram(algorithm) savvy and photogenic.

Good technique and form doesn't matter near as much as it did even just 10 years ago. The people flooding youtube with shiny vidoes get traction in spite of any traditional skill set.  It's great people can make pots in however manner pleases them or their buying public but lets not kid ourselves about what separates good pots from bad.

Well produced videos properly promoted will overcome a lot of what defines well made pots.

I always wonder if I should send these comments. Sometimes my honesty is poorly worded. 

[Min]

On 3/2/2023 at 2:21 PM, GEP said:

The best advice comes from people with years of first hand experience with selling.

+1.

I would expand this to include hands on experience with everything from making pots and glazes, working on kilns and selling pots. Real world experience. 

1 hour ago, suetectic said:

...the most successful people right now are instagram(algorithm) savvy and photogenic.

Wouldn't this depend on who and where ones market and / or audience is?

Edited March 6, 2023 by Min

[GEP]

2 hours ago, suetectic said:

the most successful people right now are instagram(algorithm) savvy and photogenic.

These are the most “successful Instagram users.” Not to be confused with “successful potters.” You can’t deposit instagram likes in the bank. What looks shiny and pretty on social media can be 100% a facade. 

I know successful potters from my real life, because doing lots of high-level shows allows you to meet the real deals. Some of them are great with social media, some are bad at it, and some of them don’t do social media at all. There is no correlation. 

My advice to anyone who wants to be a serious pro: don’t place any value on social media popularity. Do it for fun, if you want, but that’s all. 

[Callie Beller Diesel]

I’m going to discourage any disrespect on any sides of this argument. We are a community and we work to figure out solutions and offer support. Spirited opinions are fine, but we’re not going to start name calling. We do not invalidate lived experiences just because they don’t reflect our own. 

I think that the truth about the importance of social media lies somewhere in the middle of these opposing opinions, and definitely beyond overly broad statements and categorizations. If something works, but only does so under certain circumstances, that needs to be stated. There are people who make a reasonable living selling exclusively in person, selling exclusively online or using a hybrid model. I know in person and have been given numbers by people in all 3 categories. For professionals, it’s about how you choose to structure your business.

Succeeding or failing due to someone being a better marketer than they are a craftsperson is NOT a new phenomenon. 20 years ago, people were complaining about someone only getting famous because they were friends with gallery owners. Now they’re mad because folks are good at taking photos and manipulating an algorithm correctly. For those people, the socialization is EASY. The internet, especially social media,  platforms people who wouldn’t be heard otherwise. That is both the best and the worst thing about it. 

We can see amazing artists we wouldn’t have before get the opportunities they deserve, and we also get to see all the beginners do all their dubious beginner things and be loudly wrong on a very public forum. And heaven help the comments section of any 20-something woman making pots on the internet, whatever her skill level. 

Placing no value on the internet as a marketing tool and discouraging anyone in the first half of their careers from using it is doing folks a huge disservice, IMO. It disregards the fact that most people under 45 expect a certain amount of internet presence, as do enough people over that age. It’s a big way we all communicate now, and telling less established artists to not bother is denying them a tool that could work for them IF used correctly.

Doing everything that appeases the algorithm gods and neglecting the other parts of your business will definitely earn you a mental breakdown, and little else. As a potter, using service based marketing methods is going to be less than effective, and those are the types of courses that tend to be most prominent when you go looking for them. 

But if you go in acknowledging you’re not likely to be the next Florian Gadsby and just use some good photos to help build your visibility and email list, I’d call that a sound professional practice. There’s a lot of room between trying to be internet famous and building a community that supports you financially. You do need to budget your time carefully, but you can build systems that help you do that effectively. Schedule online sales and dedicate a day to batch build content leading up to that. If you need styled still photos, take them on the same day you take them for your newsletter. Build a prop box and have a simple photo setup if you can’t just leave a booth set up somewhere. If you need short form video, take about 3-4 10 minute videos of yourself as you work that can be edited together in different ways. You don’t need to take fresh video every time, adn you might need to build some skills in IMovie or equivalent. I have a packing station set up next to my inventory storage so that I can knock out a shipment in about 5-10 minutes. Faster if I’m doing more than one at once. 

 

I personally don’t live in a country that has a population base that supports 10-12 shows a year within driving distance that are large enough for me to net 5-7K each. That means I need to get my wares out online if I want to top up my income to that equivalent. If I don’t post regularly, my sales do suffer from the lack. I had to take a long social media break for my mental health last year, and my revenue shrank, the same way they would have if I didn’t sign up for some shows. 

 My photography skills are also hard won, and I find building posts regularly difficult, especially if they aren’t received the way I want them to be. I know about sanity saving systems, because I have to use them myself.  So online-only doesn’t work for me personally. But I do it, because it’s a steady trickle of income that adds up over the year. Mark once posted about making sponge holders being the difference between eating well and eating a lot of top ramen. For me, my equivalent is selling mugs online. And I think it’s important to acknowledge that the folks I know in real life who are making a good living now with an online-only model started building their audiences at markets. Email marketing is very important to their businesses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[suetectic]

3 hours ago, GEP said:

These are the most “successful Instagram users.” Not to be confused with “successful potters.” You can’t deposit instagram likes in the bank. What looks shiny and pretty on social media can be 100% a facade. 

I know successful potters from my real life, because doing lots of high-level shows allows you to meet the real deals. Some of them are great with social media, some are bad at it, and some of them don’t do social media at all. There is no correlation. 

My advice to anyone who wants to be a serious pro: don’t place any value on social media popularity. Do it for fun, if you want, but that’s all. 

 I try to avoid knee ######## blanket statements so thanks for picking up on this one.

Edited March 6, 2023 by suetectic

[suetectic]

3 hours ago, Min said:

+1.

I would expand this to include hands on experience with everything from making pots and glazes, working on kilns and selling pots. Real world experience. 

Wouldn't this depend on who and where ones market and / or audience is?

indeed it would

cheers

[Mark C.]

Just for the record -I have been pretty successful in ceramics over a 50 year period. I do not use social medial for any advertising in fact I distain it on any of my own social sites

I think in todays world starting up with clay  some may help but its a maybe will help deal. 

[DirtRoads]

9 hours ago, suetectic said:

With all due respect, insert disrespectful comment, the most successful people right now are instagram(algorithm) savvy and photogenic.

Good technique and form doesn't matter near as much as it did even just 10 years ago. The people flooding youtube with shiny vidoes get traction in spite of any traditional skill set.  It's great people can make pots in however manner pleases them or their buying public but lets not kid ourselves about what separates good pots from bad.

Well produced videos properly promoted will overcome a lot of what defines well made pots.

I always wonder if I should send these comments. Sometimes my honesty is poorly worded. 

I wouldn't call that disrespectful.   And yeah those people get a lot more hits and following than I get with just a few pictures I post.    BUT, I do get some customers come in for items or send someone to get items.    I certainly don't put MY photo there :).     And I do have a free standing retail location that allows me to push people to the store.   What I do like is that you can post to instagram and FB at the same time, just taking pictures with your phone.    Around Valentine's, I posted everyday.   I make it a point to post at least 3 times a week.   My last post was Saturday.   I'll post more when it gets closer to Easter.  My last post on FB got over 4k views and I didn't check my Instagram.   I get some hits on Instagram.    I have considered getting a gorgeous  "influencer" to partner up with me on Instagram for my jewelry.     All of my pretty nieces have married and live away now.  I would do it for jewelry, not pottery.

But yeah, being photogenic is probably key to be at the top.    I don't work on my Instagram much but use it in conjunction with FB.    Social media is a supplement to my free standing.    I'm finding it more successful this year, than any previous year.   But it mostly reaches current customer base but a few new customers have filtered in.   And as we speak it is free. (I expect this to change)

Edited March 7, 2023 by DirtRoads

[Min]

26 minutes ago, DirtRoads said:

But yeah, being photogenic is probably key to be at the top.

I have had my daughters help at many markets, I don’t know if it’s their looks or age but they definitely are a draw. 

Perhaps I shouldn’t say this and I’m opening a can of worms but the fact remains they can draw people in and increase sales. Majority  of my customers are women.

[Mark C.]

I have always belived women like to buy from Women. My sales has proven this many times. I may be the maker but I'm not the best seller. The other point is when I have a helper man or women the sales are always better.

This can be its own topic really

Edited March 7, 2023 by Mark C.

[Callie Beller Diesel]

I would also like to point out that the OP was originally concerned with folks who are transitioning from a hobby to a business. In terms of starting a business today and not anytime more than 5 years ago, many hobbyists may already have a social media presence. Some communication skills will already be in place, as opposed to those of us who grew up with no wifi and had to learn them.

 

[GEP]

2 hours ago, DirtRoads said:

And as we speak it is free. (I expect this to change)

Totally agree. The platforms are all floating the idea of charging us a monthly fee. If it happens, we shouldn’t be surprised. 

[Callie Beller Diesel]

2 hours ago, DirtRoads said:

But yeah, being photogenic is probably key to be at the top.

It doesn’t hurt, but there are lots of both “internet famous”  and monetarily successful accounts that don’t show anything more than hands. For every account featuring a young, well built male potter who got famous for throwing shirtless, there’s a dozen more who make process videos where you only see hands and clay, or photo carousels of moodily photographed pots. In fact, up until the middle of last year when IG decided to prioritize Reels over photo posts, it was completely possible to never show your face on that platform and not suffer in any way. (IG has recently walked that decision back after a lot of pressure, but that is also another post.)

Both Old Forge Creations (Joe Thompson) and NotWorkRelated_ (Sarah Hussaini) are very transparent about their income and business models, if anyone wants to have a look at a couple of examples of people making an online model work. They’ve both spoken in a number of places about both numbers and what their work days look like. For those without IG accounts, you should be able to view enough of their feeds to get an idea from your browser.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Callie Beller Diesel]

5 minutes ago, GEP said:

The platforms are all floating the idea of charging us a monthly fee

Meta has already started rolling out a subscription based verification service in New Zealand and Australia, and will expand out this year. It may or may not fly well on a long term basis. Twitter is NOT doing well right now by any metric.  But it depends on how they change it. The first iteration won’t be the last. 

 The broader content creator community is agitating for more stable ways of generating income for themselves, so another thing to watch in coming years will be if they choose to organize somehow. They say that if you’re using a service for free, you are the product being sold. When you’re consuming the content, they’re feeding you ads based on your behaviour. When you’re the one creating content, you’re being one of the reasons people go to social media in the first place. Platforms are currently making billions from free labour. 

 

[Morgan]

On 3/6/2023 at 7:59 AM, GEP said:

These are the most “successful Instagram users.” Not to be confused with “successful potters.” You can’t deposit instagram likes in the bank. What looks shiny and pretty on social media can be 100% a facade. 

I know successful potters from my real life, because doing lots of high-level shows allows you to meet the real deals. Some of them are great with social media, some are bad at it, and some of them don’t do social media at all. There is no correlation. 

My advice to anyone who wants to be a serious pro: don’t place any value on social media popularity. Do it for fun, if you want, but that’s all. 

I disagree with your response regarding the high profile Instagram people, or frankly just people that are really good at online marketing. The large majority of these folks open up their online store…you know what I am talking about “shop opens in 2days get ready!”, and sell out instantly because they have a 100k+ followers. It drives me mad really because a good deal of them are not even that great, but what they are good at is photos, videos and using the medium well. And of coarse there are successful potters that do not even own or know how to turn on a computer, but that is besides the point.

we live in a world where you can sell absolute garbage if you know how to engage people online well and that is just a reality.
 

 

[GEP]

8 hours ago, Morgan said:

I disagree with your response regarding the high profile Instagram people, or frankly just people that are really good at online marketing. The large majority of these folks open up their online store…you know what I am talking about “shop opens in 2days get ready!”, and sell out instantly because they have a 100k+ followers. It drives me mad really because a good deal of them are not even that great, but what they are good at is photos, videos and using the medium well. And of coarse there are successful potters that do not even own or know how to turn on a computer, but that is besides the point.

we live in a world where you can sell absolute garbage if you know how to engage people online well and that is just a reality.
 

 

I’m not disputing that his happens. But how many pots were in that online sale? Sometimes I look at those sold out stores and see that they sold 50 or 70 pots. Maybe 100. That’s really not that many pots. And how many times per year do these potters open their shops? 3 or 4 times per year? It’s important to look at these businesses as an overall annual format, and whether it can be sustained as a means to earn a living over time, not just one sale that sells out in a flash.

Edited March 9, 2023 by GEP

[oldlady]

try using two words, photogenic and phototecnique .    some of those folks need a director to say, "get your big, fat hand out of the shot so people can see the work!!"  or  use 2 cameras and edit!

[Joseph Fireborn]

I always find the discussions of success interesting. Success is such a hard word to pin down, what some people consider success to others might be laughable.

A potter making 50K a year in profits(not revenue) might be wildly successful to themselves, but someone else might consider that awful with the amount of manual labor it took for a person to do that in most cases. Making pots as an individual is really hard work no matter what techniques you use.

Success is really up to the individual, if you are happy making 10K a year in profits and are securing your lively hood through another manner, congrats you are happy and successful!

Pottery as a business is probably one of the most challenging forms of art type business you can take on. The equipment is large, the materials are heavy, the ingredients are a hazard and the time and manual labor that goes into each piece is usually under valued.  If you sell in person, you have to haul tons of stuff to a fair or show. If you sell online, you have to package and ship materials that are fragile and cannot be easily replaced. Neither of those things are optimal. It really is one of the most challenging sole owner businesses out there. Which probably explains why there are not a lot of individual million dollar potters, but plenty rich in livelihood, joy and a good bit of money.

I had a fundamental problem with pottery and turning it into a business, it doesn't scale very well. At some point you are going to cap out on the amount of shows you can do, pots you can make, and boxes you can pack. If you want to push into 6 figures you have to be really smart with what you do and be savvy in time management. It isn't easy to do and as others have shown it definitely is possible to do; but other types of businesses can scale so much easier with a single person and modern machinery.

I really like making pots and I like selling them too. Knowing someone is drinking out of my cups year after year experiencing joy is a nice feeling. It is one of the best reasons to be a potter. Not many forms of art are used daily in such an important thing as nourishment of our bodies.  I still think being rich in joy is way better than being rich in money. Unfortunately you need both!

I think I agree with GEP on this subject of instagram. Those people with millions of followers are wildly successful at getting likes and follows, but really they are earning way more money for instagram than themselves. That being said I know that instagram can add to your sales and get visibility to your shop, but I think the potters who utilize it the best are not the ones who have the quarterly flash sales, it is the potters who have a constant online shop available for the impulse buys. When someone is scrolling through their feed and the algorithm places one of your pots on their feed, they click through, click to your website and convert. That conversion can be a newsletter signup, clicking your show dates, or buying a pot from your shop. If you don't have any thing like this available and you are on instagram, then you need to make an adjustment.

[GEP]

16 hours ago, Joseph Fireborn said:

you have to be really smart with what you do and be savvy in time management. It isn't easy to do and as others have shown it definitely is possible to do; but other types of businesses can scale so much easier with a single person and modern machinery.

16 hours ago, Joseph Fireborn said:

but someone else might consider that awful with the amount of manual labor it took for a person to do that in most cases.

I agree with most of what you’ve written here, but these points need to be challenged a little. Being able to produce the volume that it takes to earn a living with pottery is not really about time management, or an awful amount of labor. It’s about training your body to be able to produce high volumes, using a reasonable amount of time and labor. The “modern machinery” required for a pottery studio is your own body, honed for efficiency. There’s only one way to develop this …. by doing it for a few decades. 

I do strongly agree that everyone should define “success” for themselves. But I also believe that the different definitions should be talked out openly, and weighed with relativity. Some are turning a profit, in an amount that equals a nice side business, while working another day job. Some are doing it full-time and doing well, but would not get by without another form of financial support (spouse or parents). Some are paying for their entire lives (housing, vehicles, food, utilities, health insurance, retirement plan) by making and selling pots, without any other support. All of these are valid businesses, but they aren’t equal. As a person in the last category, it really annoys me when anyone suggests I should act more like a person in the first category. That’s not the boat I’m paddling these days. I’m not putting down those in the first category, because I was that person when I started out! I’m arguing that anyone who wants to discuss the Business of Pottery should recognize and understand the differences when they are discussing it. 

[Joseph Fireborn]

3 minutes ago, GEP said:

It’s about training your body to be able to produce high volumes, using a reasonable amount of time and labor. The “modern machinery” required for a pottery studio is your own body, honed for efficiency. There’s only one way to develop this …. by doing it for a few decades. 

I totally agree here, but not everyone is capable of doing this physically day in and out. I wasn't and it is one of the main reasons I decided to stop. I kept trying but my body wouldn't let me due to health issues from the past. Your statement alone that it takes decades to develop your body into the machine required basically sums it up. At some point you have to make pots to sell pots, and if you cannot make pots you cannot make money. That is a drastically limiting business model for someone who might face health adversity; this is basically all I was stating, the OP was asking what things limit turning a hobby into a business. Physical requirements are one of them. On top of this, you cannot turn it over to someone else if you go through a health crisis. If you make the pots, decorate the pots, fire the pots, etc. No one person can replace you. It is a delicate business plan that requires you front and center every single day.

7 minutes ago, GEP said:

Some are paying for their entire lives (housing, vehicles, food, utilities, health insurance, retirement plan) by making and selling pots, without any other support. All of these are valid businesses, but they aren’t equal. As a person in the last category, it really annoys me when anyone suggests I should act more like a person in the first category. That’s not the boat I’m paddling these days. I’m not putting down those in the first category, because I was that person when I started out! I’m arguing that anyone who wants to discuss the Business of Pottery should recognize and understand the differences when they are discussing it. 

I don't understand why anyone would make that comment, but I often find myself not understanding people. If I somehow made that comment in my post, I apologize I had no intentions of that meaning. If anything I admire people who can succeed as a full-time potter with no other support, it is impressive.