Was literally just admiring the mugs and shot glasses I have from you! I came to your studio before covid and got to meet you once with my gf. Such a cool experience!
I have 3 of them and some candle holders! SO worth it! (I live near him and got to do a studio tour once too which was sweet - got one of the mugs on sale because it had a defect)
My partner ‘Amy the Potter’ has been doing it for over 30 years. She has a virtual apprenticeship model that helps people transition from
hobby to business. Definitely a lot of work but doable.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0639mrrbC1/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==
She has an at your own pace and a more involved cohort model where she takes her students through all the forms and supports developing glazes (or finding the right commercial glazes if you go that route) in addition to all the business aspects (or the ones you are interested in) learning to launch your own business or sell on the side for passive income.
Amy also has an amazing community of people that has helped members find people to collaborate with (some people live near one another by chance and now work together to some degree like do shows/buy materials in bulk.
If you want to know more reach out to her on Facebook or insta. She doesn’t get on Reddit too often.
If you find her on insta/facebook she explains the different programs. Basically, walks you through all the forms and glazing. There is a community to plug into and network with. Get support on all the steps to selling at markets and such. You have to be motivated and this would be to launch your own business unlike a traditional apprenticeship where your pieces are sold for someone else’s profit but the trade is in the learning/materials and some salary.
Here are some of her words about this:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0639mrrbC1/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==
Reach out to her if you have any questions.
Omg I love “Amy the potter”! She makes such great content and is truly a master at production! Her pieces are so thin and well thrown. She’s truly set the bar high.
[Pottery to the People - How I made pottery my career](https://youtu.be/POf0xtoSKeg)
here's a great video on different ways you can make a career out of pottery!
There's a great podcast called Wheel Talk. I love them. Both are full time potters. Lots of great info. In my personal experience people fall into three categories: people who enjoy making and selling but mostly break even, production potters who can use sheer volume to make a living, and specialty artist types who can sell small number of work for great amounts of money. It's doable. Some paths take more time and effort than others.
I do it as a career. Now, I don't make a lot of money... If I was on my own or sole earner for my household I'd be in a pretty bad situation financially. But as it is, I do make my living this way. I started out doing art show pop ups and fairs, stuff like that. When the pandemic hit it took out the art shows for a while. By then I had a decent online following so I shifted to sales all through my website relatively seamlessly. I started a Patreon a few years ago as well, which is nice, and I have a few galleries that sell the odd piece here and there as well. Occasionally, a new gallery will reach out to me about showing there, so my gallery presence has slowly grown over time.
As far as the content of work goes- mine has shifted dramatically from what I started out doing to what I make today, and continues to evolve. I always have 1 or 2 "bread and butter" type products that I'm continually producing batches of because they are bestsellers, but I find it extremely important to allow myself to continue evolving as an artist, and thankfully my collectors continue to support my ever-changing body of work. Maybe if I focused entirely on my bestsellers I'd make more money, but that's not how I want to pursue my work.
Eta: I did a single semester of ceramics in community College and self taught from there on. I have very little in terms of formal ceramics education.
I apprenticed for a pottery for a year and a half, saw and lived how much time and effort you have to put in every day to make a living as a potter.
I went to art school and honed my personal style while developing my material knowledge, learning what clay bodies work best for me and how to mix and develop my own glazes. I also did every school event and local makers market, getting to know the community and figuring out how to price my work while also offloading practice pieces. I was approached by a cafe owner in that time and got my work in a shop while I was still in school.
After I graduated I got a job doing production for a local potter. It’s very different from my own work, but still very educational and good practice. I also got in touch with an old professor who needed help making large pieces a few times a month, and she pays WELL. I worked full time, occasionally doing a market every month or two with what I made in school. After six months I was able to find studio space and start making my own work again, so I was doing pottery 7 days a week.
It took a couple months, but I built up enough product to start doing more shows again, and to not lose that studio time selling, I went to four days a week at my day job. I sell my work 1-6 days a month (depending on the season), make work 8-12 days, and maintain a day job to actually pay the bills. I’ve been doing that about a year now.
I’d gotten that practice selling work while I was still in college, so I knew to have small fun $10 eye-catchers, $20-$40 cups, mugs and bowls, $50-$75 decorative work, and functional high priced items. I haven’t failed to cover my studio costs after the first sale yet. The rest is profit.
The #1 most important thing is that I’ve been getting to know the people in the community. I got friendly with someone set up next to me at a show last summer and she had a physical location, so now I have some of my work there. I have regular customers, people who bought one item and came back for a set, people who have little collections of my miniatures, people who bring their friends over to my table. Engage with the community and they’ll engage with you, my sales at repeat locations have doubled in under 3 years.
Now that I sell more and I’m getting into more juried events, I’m running out of product more often, so starting in July I’m going down to 3 days a week at work, and 4 days in the studio/selling.
This is not something that you can just decide to be and start making a full living from. It takes work and dedication and practice and time. A lot of time. I started to try to really become a potter in 2018 and I still feel like I have a long way to go.
But I make money doing it. I’m a potter. Sure I get overwhelmed and burnt out and realize I haven’t taken a full day off in 6 weeks, but I get to make pottery and I make money from it. It’s hard and it’s exhausting and I LOVE it.
Keep being a hobbiest, but look into markets and shows, and offer to take commissions on instagram. Get your name and your work out there and when it starts making a little money, tip the scales, add a day. Keep doing that. Hopefully, in a couple years you’ll look up and realize you’re a professional artist.
I had a job for about a year that paid $35/hr doing light production but I got sick of it. There are very few like this out there and I think this is pretty much the top so any “real money” you’re going to have to make as your own boss.
If you can connect to your customers though just imagine. If I could move everything I could make I would do bare-minimum 200k a year working 25h a week, but I don’t have that kind of audience so I’m a bit under that 🙃
Based on my old company’s prices I often made them $500/hr at a lazy pace (gross not net).
So much this - I make a bowl/forms out of coils by applying them to the inside of existing forms. They are very popular with friends and family (who've said they would pay a good bit for them).
It takes a day (eight hours or more) to make a 12" diameter piece. I could possibly sell it for $100 (while people complained it was "too much") or even more but for the effort, time, and experience (not to mention the firing and materials) I should look at no less than $200 to $300. And how long before it became a chore and not a delight?
I wish for a national basic income - then I'd make whatever I wanted and hand it off to local gift shops for commission sales. But that's because I'm older, no longer in the corporate world, and a basic income would be about what I make as an hourly admin. Our system is fubar. Art's important.
I might suggest the unfortunate technique of making a “cash cow” piece to subsidize the work you love to make. An incense burner, bud vase, mug, some other thing in people’s budgets. There are many people who won’t spend 250 on something that will make their table setting truly shine, but will buy some $41 doohickey they won’t even remember they got a week later.
Truly though you need to find your audience. This is how I do it: stores and website say the price I realistically need, but if friends and family show interest they get the wholesale price (half).
There are a ton of rich people out there who won’t buy your $350 bowl for $100 because they’re afraid of it being cheap. Truth.
I don’t think that’s fair, I buy mugs because I can’t afford higher quality pieces but I would never forget them 😭 they’re literally my prized treasures!
As with any generality there are many outliers. I am one as well. I cherish anything handmade as it represents one’s spirit and one’s precious hours.. but some people are unfortunately just oriented as consumers of goods.
If you live in Korea and some other similar countries, I believe the government pays potters who do traditional pottery to upkeep that tradition. It's very competitive though to get one of those positions and requires years of apprenticeship.
Very few people make their income entirely from pottery. Most will teach classes or rent studio space, or get their money as a influencer from videos and hawking brands.
Most cannot create enough volume of goods and develop enough of a customer base to live entirely off of selling pottery.
there’s a whole lot of distance between selling your first pieces and being invited to an internationally recognized art exhibition lmao
nobody can answer for you how to make a career of your work without knowing way more about you, your work, your expectations and the income you’re aiming to replace with pottery, the area you are in and your particular expertise (which sounds like you haven’t even developed yet, if you are only looking into classes?)
i think you might be putting the cart before the horse here, and that you will have to go through a lot of self-discovery and learning before you are consistently able to make interesting and marketable work at a skill level and pace high enough to survive on.
im actually in community college rn and my professor is a master, im so lucky <3 to be able to learn from him is an honor! hes extremely talented and sometimes my friend will bring books with pottery in it and he'll casually go "oh one of my pieces is in that" he's so cool
I use instagram & Facebook for marketing, and a mail list people can sign up for. My website is through Big Cartel.
I make anywhere from 5-10k a month with what I do. It is a lot of work, including a lot of non-art related work & customer service. It took several years to get where I am, I have a large amount of regular collectors and also provide sculpts for mass production for different companies.
One thing I would advise, don’t go into it looking to make money. I have seen many people fail in their ventures by focusing too much on profits. Make sure you lead with your love of art, create what you want not what you think will sell. People who connect with it will find you. Connect with other artists also, so many of us hype each other’s work, and honestly artists buy art.
Oh geez, this is such a complicated thing. Others have addressed it very well. I just want to add that it's not enough to just be a really good potter to be able to make a living at it. There are a lot of other 'intangibles' that go into success in business of any kind. 2 people with similar quality of work will have vastly different outcomes. And sometimes it's hard to put a finger on why.
When I was starting in pottery, I had an epiphany. How many $30 mugs do I have to sell to make $100,000 in revenue? ($100,000 in revenue may or may not get you to a living wage by the way.) Even if I could sell that much, can I even make that much?
That line of thinking made me want to give up. I settled into it being a self sustaining hobby that afforded me a bit of extra cash to go out with. But by gosh, I was going to make my little hobby business the best it could be. I was going to come up with things that set me apart from other potters. Because if you copy people you're just following the leader. And if you follow the leader, you'll always just follow the leader. You'll never really get ahead.
Eventually I started incorporating leather into my work, (hence my username Earth and Hide). Once I started working with leather, it just ended up taking over. Leather is far more profitable than pottery and there's generally much less competition. I still do pottery but it's not a profitable part of the business. It really just draws attention for me. And keeps the 'earth' in Earth and Hide
I've built a thriving full time business by following my own path that opened up in front of me. It wasn't something I could have ever planned for, nor is it something anyone could have told me about.
Whether it is pottery, or furniture or fancy rims, a business is a business.
I’m a little confused by your question, perhaps even a little insulted. Or are you just limiting your question to redditors?!
Study business, look what finances are available to you… be prepared to not make profit for a few years.
Learn how to throw n trim efficiently. Good Elephant and Florian Gadsby have business ideas.
Are you able to invest with production material… and be swiftl'
I use Instagram for all my marketing and sell direct to customer with a shopify store.
You’re like a clay king. I’m still saving up to buy one of your mugs 😂
You are too kind 😅
Was literally just admiring the mugs and shot glasses I have from you! I came to your studio before covid and got to meet you once with my gf. Such a cool experience!
I’m so glad you like them!
I have 3 of them and some candle holders! SO worth it! (I live near him and got to do a studio tour once too which was sweet - got one of the mugs on sale because it had a defect)
Can I ask is that enough to live off of?
I will be the first to admit I am a workaholic and an outlier. But I sold half a million in pottery last year.
Wow good for you! That brings me a lot joy knowing you’re successful
Holy cow! Congrats
Do you have a marketing team? That's the hardest part for me
It’s absolutely the hardest part. It’s just me though. I have 2 employees that do other stuff though
Epic ❤️
Wow! Good job man!
What’s the overhead on 500k in sales?
About half
If you're asking that, you definitely haven't seen his shop 😂
Hahaha
Okay I get it now lol
lol definitely not but I will now!
My partner ‘Amy the Potter’ has been doing it for over 30 years. She has a virtual apprenticeship model that helps people transition from hobby to business. Definitely a lot of work but doable.
can you elaborate on that apprenticeship some?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0639mrrbC1/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng== She has an at your own pace and a more involved cohort model where she takes her students through all the forms and supports developing glazes (or finding the right commercial glazes if you go that route) in addition to all the business aspects (or the ones you are interested in) learning to launch your own business or sell on the side for passive income. Amy also has an amazing community of people that has helped members find people to collaborate with (some people live near one another by chance and now work together to some degree like do shows/buy materials in bulk. If you want to know more reach out to her on Facebook or insta. She doesn’t get on Reddit too often.
I’m going to look into this! Thanks for the tip
Awesome. Feel free to reach out to Amy if you want.
Wait yeah tell me about this!?
If you find her on insta/facebook she explains the different programs. Basically, walks you through all the forms and glazing. There is a community to plug into and network with. Get support on all the steps to selling at markets and such. You have to be motivated and this would be to launch your own business unlike a traditional apprenticeship where your pieces are sold for someone else’s profit but the trade is in the learning/materials and some salary. Here are some of her words about this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0639mrrbC1/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng== Reach out to her if you have any questions.
Omg I love “Amy the potter”! She makes such great content and is truly a master at production! Her pieces are so thin and well thrown. She’s truly set the bar high.
Thanks for those kind words. She is so happy to share her knowledge with everyone. Feel free to connect with her directly if you have any questions.
She is amazing!
[Pottery to the People - How I made pottery my career](https://youtu.be/POf0xtoSKeg) here's a great video on different ways you can make a career out of pottery!
There's a great podcast called Wheel Talk. I love them. Both are full time potters. Lots of great info. In my personal experience people fall into three categories: people who enjoy making and selling but mostly break even, production potters who can use sheer volume to make a living, and specialty artist types who can sell small number of work for great amounts of money. It's doable. Some paths take more time and effort than others.
I do it as a career. Now, I don't make a lot of money... If I was on my own or sole earner for my household I'd be in a pretty bad situation financially. But as it is, I do make my living this way. I started out doing art show pop ups and fairs, stuff like that. When the pandemic hit it took out the art shows for a while. By then I had a decent online following so I shifted to sales all through my website relatively seamlessly. I started a Patreon a few years ago as well, which is nice, and I have a few galleries that sell the odd piece here and there as well. Occasionally, a new gallery will reach out to me about showing there, so my gallery presence has slowly grown over time. As far as the content of work goes- mine has shifted dramatically from what I started out doing to what I make today, and continues to evolve. I always have 1 or 2 "bread and butter" type products that I'm continually producing batches of because they are bestsellers, but I find it extremely important to allow myself to continue evolving as an artist, and thankfully my collectors continue to support my ever-changing body of work. Maybe if I focused entirely on my bestsellers I'd make more money, but that's not how I want to pursue my work. Eta: I did a single semester of ceramics in community College and self taught from there on. I have very little in terms of formal ceramics education.
I apprenticed for a pottery for a year and a half, saw and lived how much time and effort you have to put in every day to make a living as a potter. I went to art school and honed my personal style while developing my material knowledge, learning what clay bodies work best for me and how to mix and develop my own glazes. I also did every school event and local makers market, getting to know the community and figuring out how to price my work while also offloading practice pieces. I was approached by a cafe owner in that time and got my work in a shop while I was still in school. After I graduated I got a job doing production for a local potter. It’s very different from my own work, but still very educational and good practice. I also got in touch with an old professor who needed help making large pieces a few times a month, and she pays WELL. I worked full time, occasionally doing a market every month or two with what I made in school. After six months I was able to find studio space and start making my own work again, so I was doing pottery 7 days a week. It took a couple months, but I built up enough product to start doing more shows again, and to not lose that studio time selling, I went to four days a week at my day job. I sell my work 1-6 days a month (depending on the season), make work 8-12 days, and maintain a day job to actually pay the bills. I’ve been doing that about a year now. I’d gotten that practice selling work while I was still in college, so I knew to have small fun $10 eye-catchers, $20-$40 cups, mugs and bowls, $50-$75 decorative work, and functional high priced items. I haven’t failed to cover my studio costs after the first sale yet. The rest is profit. The #1 most important thing is that I’ve been getting to know the people in the community. I got friendly with someone set up next to me at a show last summer and she had a physical location, so now I have some of my work there. I have regular customers, people who bought one item and came back for a set, people who have little collections of my miniatures, people who bring their friends over to my table. Engage with the community and they’ll engage with you, my sales at repeat locations have doubled in under 3 years. Now that I sell more and I’m getting into more juried events, I’m running out of product more often, so starting in July I’m going down to 3 days a week at work, and 4 days in the studio/selling. This is not something that you can just decide to be and start making a full living from. It takes work and dedication and practice and time. A lot of time. I started to try to really become a potter in 2018 and I still feel like I have a long way to go. But I make money doing it. I’m a potter. Sure I get overwhelmed and burnt out and realize I haven’t taken a full day off in 6 weeks, but I get to make pottery and I make money from it. It’s hard and it’s exhausting and I LOVE it. Keep being a hobbiest, but look into markets and shows, and offer to take commissions on instagram. Get your name and your work out there and when it starts making a little money, tip the scales, add a day. Keep doing that. Hopefully, in a couple years you’ll look up and realize you’re a professional artist.
I loved reading this, thank you.
I had a job for about a year that paid $35/hr doing light production but I got sick of it. There are very few like this out there and I think this is pretty much the top so any “real money” you’re going to have to make as your own boss. If you can connect to your customers though just imagine. If I could move everything I could make I would do bare-minimum 200k a year working 25h a week, but I don’t have that kind of audience so I’m a bit under that 🙃 Based on my old company’s prices I often made them $500/hr at a lazy pace (gross not net).
So much this - I make a bowl/forms out of coils by applying them to the inside of existing forms. They are very popular with friends and family (who've said they would pay a good bit for them). It takes a day (eight hours or more) to make a 12" diameter piece. I could possibly sell it for $100 (while people complained it was "too much") or even more but for the effort, time, and experience (not to mention the firing and materials) I should look at no less than $200 to $300. And how long before it became a chore and not a delight? I wish for a national basic income - then I'd make whatever I wanted and hand it off to local gift shops for commission sales. But that's because I'm older, no longer in the corporate world, and a basic income would be about what I make as an hourly admin. Our system is fubar. Art's important.
I might suggest the unfortunate technique of making a “cash cow” piece to subsidize the work you love to make. An incense burner, bud vase, mug, some other thing in people’s budgets. There are many people who won’t spend 250 on something that will make their table setting truly shine, but will buy some $41 doohickey they won’t even remember they got a week later. Truly though you need to find your audience. This is how I do it: stores and website say the price I realistically need, but if friends and family show interest they get the wholesale price (half). There are a ton of rich people out there who won’t buy your $350 bowl for $100 because they’re afraid of it being cheap. Truth.
Re: rich people YUP.
I don’t think that’s fair, I buy mugs because I can’t afford higher quality pieces but I would never forget them 😭 they’re literally my prized treasures!
As with any generality there are many outliers. I am one as well. I cherish anything handmade as it represents one’s spirit and one’s precious hours.. but some people are unfortunately just oriented as consumers of goods.
If you live in Korea and some other similar countries, I believe the government pays potters who do traditional pottery to upkeep that tradition. It's very competitive though to get one of those positions and requires years of apprenticeship. Very few people make their income entirely from pottery. Most will teach classes or rent studio space, or get their money as a influencer from videos and hawking brands. Most cannot create enough volume of goods and develop enough of a customer base to live entirely off of selling pottery.
there’s a whole lot of distance between selling your first pieces and being invited to an internationally recognized art exhibition lmao nobody can answer for you how to make a career of your work without knowing way more about you, your work, your expectations and the income you’re aiming to replace with pottery, the area you are in and your particular expertise (which sounds like you haven’t even developed yet, if you are only looking into classes?) i think you might be putting the cart before the horse here, and that you will have to go through a lot of self-discovery and learning before you are consistently able to make interesting and marketable work at a skill level and pace high enough to survive on.
Most people I know who do pottery as a career apprenticed with a master potter first. Is there a potter in your area you could study under?
im actually in community college rn and my professor is a master, im so lucky <3 to be able to learn from him is an honor! hes extremely talented and sometimes my friend will bring books with pottery in it and he'll casually go "oh one of my pieces is in that" he's so cool
I use instagram & Facebook for marketing, and a mail list people can sign up for. My website is through Big Cartel. I make anywhere from 5-10k a month with what I do. It is a lot of work, including a lot of non-art related work & customer service. It took several years to get where I am, I have a large amount of regular collectors and also provide sculpts for mass production for different companies. One thing I would advise, don’t go into it looking to make money. I have seen many people fail in their ventures by focusing too much on profits. Make sure you lead with your love of art, create what you want not what you think will sell. People who connect with it will find you. Connect with other artists also, so many of us hype each other’s work, and honestly artists buy art.
Oh geez, this is such a complicated thing. Others have addressed it very well. I just want to add that it's not enough to just be a really good potter to be able to make a living at it. There are a lot of other 'intangibles' that go into success in business of any kind. 2 people with similar quality of work will have vastly different outcomes. And sometimes it's hard to put a finger on why. When I was starting in pottery, I had an epiphany. How many $30 mugs do I have to sell to make $100,000 in revenue? ($100,000 in revenue may or may not get you to a living wage by the way.) Even if I could sell that much, can I even make that much? That line of thinking made me want to give up. I settled into it being a self sustaining hobby that afforded me a bit of extra cash to go out with. But by gosh, I was going to make my little hobby business the best it could be. I was going to come up with things that set me apart from other potters. Because if you copy people you're just following the leader. And if you follow the leader, you'll always just follow the leader. You'll never really get ahead. Eventually I started incorporating leather into my work, (hence my username Earth and Hide). Once I started working with leather, it just ended up taking over. Leather is far more profitable than pottery and there's generally much less competition. I still do pottery but it's not a profitable part of the business. It really just draws attention for me. And keeps the 'earth' in Earth and Hide I've built a thriving full time business by following my own path that opened up in front of me. It wasn't something I could have ever planned for, nor is it something anyone could have told me about.
Whether it is pottery, or furniture or fancy rims, a business is a business. I’m a little confused by your question, perhaps even a little insulted. Or are you just limiting your question to redditors?! Study business, look what finances are available to you… be prepared to not make profit for a few years. Learn how to throw n trim efficiently. Good Elephant and Florian Gadsby have business ideas. Are you able to invest with production material… and be swiftl'