Selling ceramics without the pottery clichés

Slate & Ember fire around ninety pieces a month from a converted boathouse, and every marketplace they sold through wrapped that work in the same soft-focus artisan clichés — linen backdrops, handwritten fonts, 'made with love'. The work is rigorous; the presentation was sentimental. Meanwhile marketplace fees were taking 24% of every sale.

The identity treats ceramics the way the makers do: as material science with a temper. Each glaze is numbered and charted; each batch is dated and kiln-logged; the product photography brief banned props entirely. The shop presents work in a strict grid — piece, clay body, glaze number, price — and lets the objects be the only soft thing on the page.

Because stock arrives in kiln batches of sixty to ninety pieces and sells out, we designed the empty state as carefully as the shop itself. A sold-out catalogue becomes an archive with a firing calendar and a single restock-notification field, so scarcity reads as rhythm rather than failure.

Direct online revenue grew 64% in the first year as buyers followed the studio off the marketplaces. Batch drops now sell through in days, the mailing list converts at a rate the owners initially assumed was an analytics bug, and wholesale enquiries from restaurants — a market they'd never reached — arrived unprompted.