Transcription
I'm definitely not the kind of person that says, "Monetize your hobbies, you know, start a side business, hustle, hustle." That is so not me. And if you're happy for pottery to stay as a hobby, I support you all the way. However, if you aren't happy with your job and you're looking for ways that you can make pottery into a career, I've got you.
Today, I've got 12 different jobs you can have as a potter, and I can really speak to them because I personally have done at least eight of them. So, let's get into it.
Number one, this is the most obvious, so we can just get it out of the way: selling your pottery online. And probably because you're watching me on YouTube, you're already aware of the huge potential of reaching a global audience. Now, I don't want to dwell on this one very long because I already have a whole video about it, but to sum it up, the most important things is that you are going to be your own business, so things like branding and marketing are very important here. You do need to build up an audience for this to work, but I will tell you, it doesn't need to be on these obvious platforms that everyone uses, like, you know, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. In my opinion, one of the most underrated platforms for selling pottery online is Pinterest, possibly also Etsy.
Okay, alternatively, if you are not interested in the marketing side of having a business, you can also sell on commission to galleries and shops. Now, this is not always the case, but in my experience, the split is about 60-40, so 60% of the money goes to you and 40% goes to the shop. And people love to complain about that 40%, but please keep in mind that the gallery or shop will almost certainly have a higher overhead than you have. They need to pay rent on the shop, pay their employees, and also tax and everything else associated with having a business. And on top of that, they are doing all of the customer acquisition. So, honestly, I think it's a pretty good deal if you find the right fit.
One downside, though, and this is something that personally put me off of commission is that if a piece doesn't sell and you get it back in six months or one year later, it's just been sitting there for that time and you haven't gotten paid. At this point, at least in my experience, my collection, like, I've moved on to another collection, my interests have progressed, and I don't even feel like selling this piece anymore. So, it felt to me almost like a wasted piece. But I want to say this is just how I work, and if you are consistently making the same pieces over and over again and you're working with the right shop, this might be a perfect solution for you. So, the most important thing is that the customers in the shop are actually the exact same customers, they are the right customers for your pottery.
On the other hand, a big benefit to selling commission is typically similar to selling directly to customers online: you can make whatever you want. If you get tired of a certain piece, you don't need to make that anymore. You have all that artistic freedom, which is the thing that makes it very different from the next option, which is selling wholesale.
Okay, selling wholesale is kind of a beast, but it can be extremely profitable if you make the right products, price wisely, and find the right distributors. This is when a shop wants to buy a large amount of your products upfront, paying in full, and then it's completely up to them to sell your wares or not. Personally, I've done both, and I actually prefer this system better, like selling wholesale. However, this works best if you were producing a lot of the same pieces over and over again. A shop will want to, for example, buy 20 mugs in each colorway so that it's more efficient for them to market. But it's obviously a bigger risk for the shop owners, which is why sometimes they'll want you to start selling commission first, and then eventually you can convince them to change this model if you prefer.
This is also why the split is usually 50-50, but I want to encourage you not to think about it that way. If you are going into production like this, you should price your wares by adding up your material cost, labor cost, like your salary, overhead, profit, and tax. All of that together is going to equal your wholesale price. This price you are only going to offer B2B, so to other businesses, and you want to offer that from a certain price amount, I.E., like 300 Euro or 20 pots, something like that. Then you can double it to get your retail price. Your retail price is the price that you sell to customers, whether it's in your own shop, online, or to your neighbor down the street. And if you are selling online and you're like, "What the heck, I could never charge that much," wholesale might not be for you.
To make this work, you need to be really efficient and also make the right things. For example, jewelry and decor items like vases generally have a higher price point than cups and mugs. Although I'll say, with the right audience, you can absolutely sell mugs for 50, 100, even 500 Euro, but you need the right audience, and it needs to be worth it.
Okay, this is going to be the last option for selling your pottery before we get into some other money-making ideas, and that is to sell your pottery to a restaurant or cafe. This will work almost identically to selling wholesale. Indeed, you are still selling wholesale, but instead of a shop reselling your work for a profit, the restaurant will obviously use your pottery for, you know, serving their dishes on. This can be a really fun one because the restaurant owners often have something very particular in mind and will work with you to make something custom, which I always think is a really fun creative challenge, and it's also really cool to see your pottery in a restaurant, I think.
Of course, the same wholesale pricing applies here, just like the last one. And here again, you will be making the same pieces over and over again, but this can be really great if you're looking for, like, a long-term collaborative project because the great and terrible thing about pottery is that occasionally it breaks, and the restaurant will have to buy more from you. Also, in my experience, restaurant owners talk to each other, so if you're starting to sell in one restaurant, chances are another restaurant might approach you to work with them.
Okay, for the next point, let's move away from self-employment. So, all these points up till now, we were talking about self-employment. Who wants to deal with all that pricing, negotiating, marketing, etc.? You just want to work with clay and you don't want to deal with the rest. Well, working in production, AKA being a production potter, might be the best option for you. When you work as a production potter, you are hiring out your skills at the wheel or, you know, whatever you do, to another ceramicist who has a business. You'll be hired by them, they will tell you what to make, and you will make it. It's really that simple.
Now, this can happen in your studio, or you can, like, go to work and work in someone else's studio. And this can be full-time, like totally normal with benefits and everything, or it can be just as a freelancer, you know, contract basis. It just depends on the scale of production. So, this has the unique benefit of working for someone. And as a self-employed person, I know there's a lot of benefits to that. So, while most of these gigs that I'm mentioning here are self-employed, if you'd rather not deal with all the faff of accounting, marketing, and taxes, and you just want your paycheck, you know, you just want to get your hands in the clay and make money, this one might really be the right choice for you.
There are, however, obviously some downsides. One, and for me, the reason why I absolutely could never do this, is that you will be making the same pottery over and over again. Like, some places will have specialists who just make the same shapes or just glaze, like at a certain level, that's what you do. And you will be working in batches of hundreds or thousands instead of tens. Some places will pay by the piece. So, the upside is that you will learn to be very fast, very efficient, and very good. But another downside is, I want you to keep in mind that this is going to be hard on your body. So, just like any physical job where you're doing the same movement over and over again, repetitive stress is an absolute killer. So, please proceed with caution and make sure you're as fit as you can be, or you might suffer long-term health issues with this.
Okay, let's make a hard transition away from making pottery to sell, and let's talk about my love: teaching. Now, this is the part that I have the most experience in, and this is the part where I actually started to realize, "Okay, pottery can be a job." Now, you can teach kids or adults. You can teach at schools, community centers, private studios, community studios, recreational centers. There are loads of options here. And I guess the main skill that you need here is to be good with people and to have, like, an enthusiasm for clay. I personally don't really think you need to be an absolute expert to start teaching. God knows I wasn't, but you should be maybe a couple years into your pottery journey, so you know at least what you're talking about, at least with adults. I think with kids, you can actually start teaching at pretty much any level, but in my experience, teaching kids is way harder, and I think you should probably have some, like, pedagogy skills for teaching that you don't necessarily need for teaching adults. Kids are tricky, but teaching can also be really fun.
This is also something you can do employed or self-employed. There's definitely more money in self-employed teaching, but there's obviously at least double the work when you factor in customer acquisition and all the administration work, studio maintenance. So, if you're not keen on all that stuff, you could go to work for, like, a school or a community center, something like that.
So, for me, teaching eventually transitioned into my next job, which is where I started to see some pretty good money for the first time in my life, and this was founding and running a community studio. A community studio is a place where you teach classes, but you usually also offer a membership program where beginning and intermediate potters can use the space, tools, and materials. So, those of you who have been around for longer than a year know that back in Berlin, I founded a community studio. From 2019, we survived the pandemic, and eventually, I closed it in 2021. This is actually where I got the name "Pottery to the People," and I only started this YouTube channel to teach my customers during the Corona lockdowns. Wow, things have changed.
But a community studio can be an amazing job for people who love to teach, to be around people, and just share their passion for clay. If you found it in the right place, like I would recommend a major city, and with the right people, it could also be extremely profitable. But keep in mind that at a certain scale, managing a studio is going to be its own job. So, in my experience, as the studio grew, I got more and more removed from the students and the clay. Eventually, I had to hire teachers and staff to run the studio while I was just, like, doing the paperwork. That was a little hard for me, and honestly, I did burn out and I didn't want to do it anymore. That said, it was an amazing job, and honestly, until now, it was the best job I ever had.
So, my advice is, if this is something that's interesting for you, that while anyone could do it, like, I literally had zero qualifications, someone who is extroverted, who loves being around people, loves managing people and being a team leader, someone who doesn't get overstimulated easily, that's the kind of person that I think would flourish in this job. This is very much a people-oriented job. That or you found it with someone else who can, like, pick up the slack where you're lacking. That was also a mistake that I think I made. But for me, as an introvert who is very easily overstimulated, I was like, constantly chasing rest and quiet, and it was a little hard for me. The only thing that kept me going was this amazing membership and the people I met there, like, I really, really loved them. So, I do miss it in a way, but I'm also way more at peace with my current job.
That takes us to the next point, which is selling tools. So, craftspeople of all kinds have made their own tools. We know our trades better than anyone else, right? This is definitely true about pottery. So, there's Cheryl, Mud Tools, Bison, Garrity, Diamond Core, GR Pottery Forms, just to name a few potter-owned small businesses. There's definitely money to be made making and selling tools that make potters' lives easier.
Now, this is where we get to my latest project, which is slab pottery templates. So, I don't talk about this very much, and I don't know why. I think I'm not a very good salesperson, but I have been making and selling slab pottery templates since I was running my Berlin studio. So, these come in both physical and digital versions. So, the digital version, you can just print at home at your own printer, and they give you the exact sizes and dimensions you need to create a specific pottery project. The slab templates are really great for beginners because it completely removes the tricky parts, and I have a video tutorial for each project, so it makes it really, really easy to get started. But the big news is that I actually just launched a second YouTube channel that will host all of my template tutorials. I will have the channel linked down below so you can browse the different projects I have available. I'm trying to get into the rhythm of creating a new template every month, and those will be posted up on the new channel, so make sure you've subscribed. And last week, I just launched the new T-ball template that I'm completely in love with.
Okay, but selling tools is a super broad category, right? So, you can think about physical tools like ribs, trimming tools, bats, stamps, knives, or digital tools like my templates. So, like, you could also make a pottery kit, for example, that contains the clay, some glazes, you know, a basic tool kit, something that people will want to buy to get started. The options are really endless here.
Okay, so moving on, the next possible income source for potters that I really think that you should be considering, and also one that I'm slightly falling into, is content creator. Okay, I admit I kind of hate this label, but I do think it's precise. So, what I mean by content is making videos, images, even text on YouTube, Instagram, you know, TikTok, whatever, that is entertaining or instructive. Basically, anything that is keeping people interested in exchange for money. So, this money can come from two different places: advertisements paid up by the platform, so like YouTube AdSense, that's based on viewership. The other way that you can make money here is from having sponsors. So, you know when a YouTuber says, like, "Blah blah blah, this video is sponsored by," they're getting paid for that ad. Maybe this is basic stuff, but I just want to say, in case you don't know, like, my family was absolutely surprised when I told them that YouTube pays me to make videos. I had to kind of explain it to them. I thought this whole thing was for fun, which it is fun.
Anyway, for this to actually be an income, you need to develop an audience, and this will take time. So, as I mentioned, I've been on YouTube since the first Corona lockdown, so March 2020, and my income from YouTube is still not enough to live by completely. But what is absolutely true, and what I think is a reason for you to develop your audience anyway on some platform, doesn't have to be YouTube, is that this income stream works pretty well along with the other ones. So, like, no one would buy my templates, my pottery, or my online courses if they didn't know about me. And how do they know about me? Pretty much YouTube and Instagram.
Another way to make money as a potter is to sell online classes. Yes, this is another income stream that I've dipped my fingers into. Y'all, the pandemic absolutely changed my life. And the other panic that I felt when I had to close my studio and I still had 5,000 Euro of running costs to pay each month, I had to get creative. And this is when I filmed my first online course. So, online courses go really great along with working as a content creator because you already know how to film stuff and you have an audience. So, what you can do is film a more in-depth tutorial and put it behind a paywall. So, I have four online courses that are up on my website, and they still bring a little bit of money every month. It's nice because it's passive, but I could definitely make more money if I promoted them more. But we've already talked about that, I'm not the best seller. Promotion is just hard for me, you know? You can buy my online classes, just, just go buy them if you want, whatever.
Okay, let's rewind and backtrack back into the real world because I want to talk to you about another job that you can have as a ceramicist that doesn't require you to be self-employed, doesn't require you to be online, or build up an audience at all, and that is the job of a studio technician, or studio tech for short. So, these are potters who work in a community studio or at a university or even in a production space whose job it is to maintain the studio. So, typically, they're loading the kiln, recycling clay, that kind of stuff, you know, moving pots from one side to the other. Now, this job might be combined with a teaching job or a production pottery job, or it could just be its own job. And this is a nice one again because it takes you out of the world of self-employment and into a steady, you know, predictable income.
Now, these might not be the best-paid jobs. Like, often they're held by beginners who might not be ready to teach yet, but they can absolutely be well-paid if you are a skilled potter who, for example, knows how to repair a kiln, or knows how to repair a pug mill, or, you know, could build and fire an anagama kiln. So, definitely the more skilled you are, or like where you're working, the salary for this job could be higher.
Now, last but not least, and I think this is one of the most under-acknowledged jobs within the field of pottery, is to simply make art. Yes, we are potters, so people mostly think of us as making tableware, but it doesn't just need to be that. We can make sculptures and wall decor and cups and mugs that are so beautiful and intricate that anyone would consider them to be art. I mean, personally, I definitely think pottery is art anyway, but there's no reason that you, as a ceramicist, can't put your work in galleries or museums and charge thousands of dollars for your piece of talent.
So, that's it for me today. I think that this is probably not a completely exhaustive list. So, if you guys have any other ideas where you can make money as a potter, definitely leave them down below, especially if you have experience in these fields. I would love to hear, you know, how you liked them. So, stay tuned for the next video where I'm definitely getting myself back into making. I just needed a week off. I hope you guys understand. So, anyway, I hope you guys have a lovely and creative day. Bye, friends.