“Etsy vs. Your own website. Which is better?” It’s a question I see asked online endlessly. I see the responses fought over just as endlessly. But is it really an either/or? We dig into that on this next installment of our “The Launch” series - where I dig into the firsthand experiences Francesco & I are having in starting our own ceramics business. Spoiler - We’re using both Etsy and our own website, because there are pros and cons to both. And it’s those pros & cons we discuss in this episode so you can make the decision that’s right for you.

I know I'm not the only one who finds social media to be exhausting. The idea of keeping up with trends sounds equivalent to nails on a chalkboard to me. But at the same time, I know there is a huge opportunity on social media. After all, Instagram alone has 2 billion users. Enter Allie Mason. A data-based marketing strategist who understands that us solo-preneurs and small independent businesses don’t necessarily have the time (or the desire) to be spending all of our time keeping up with the ever changing world of social media. What Allie teaches focuses on using social media for what it can do for us all to grow our businesses, but not having it be our businesses.

On this week’s episode I talk with founding Community member, Connie Cole, about her winding path to becoming a full-time potter. We discuss her battle with imposter syndrome, what finding a “gateway drug” has done for her business and the assault on creativity she’s experienced over time (and of course, how she’s battling against it!)

FOMO (or the fear of missing out) seems to surround us. But it’s especially pervasive online - as we watch other people live their lives (or at least the versions they show us), and do things that perhaps we wish we could do or dream about doing. Like attending a conference perhaps? This week were talking about the realities of attending or NOT attending NCECA as well as the larger issues in our lives and businesses that FOMO causes.

Do you get overwhelmed at the idea of making your studio practice environmentally friendly? It can seem impossible to figure out where to start and what actually makes an impact. The science of climate change is complicated at best, and more often than not confusing. Which is exactly why I’m so grateful for people like Yuliya Makliuk - a trained ecologist and potter. Yuliya recently wrote the book Potters Save the World: Learn to Make Sustainable Ceramics and Help Protect the Earth, and on this week’s episode we talk all about the process of self-publishing this important book as well as creating her own pottery amidst an ever changing reality of living in Ukraine.

The internet can be amazing for connecting us all to resources we wouldn’t otherwise have access to. But it can also be absolutely overwhelming. With so many people teaching online, how can we tell who actually knows what they are doing? How do we know (especially if we decide to pay) that they are actually qualified to teach us? I’m not talking about formal qualifications and diplomas here - obviously, there are plenty of problems with the traditional structures of arts education. But at the same time, there’s additionally the sneaky problem of online education not having any sort of barrier to access - literally anyone can call themselves a teacher on the internet.

During Part Two of my conversation with Hope Limyansky-Smith, we dig into the pros & cons of being online educators and the ways in which we ourselves vet other educators we want to learn from as students ourselves. Before all of that, we also have a very important discussion on setting boundaries online both for ourselves and with each other so that we can continue to enjoy building new friendships online, which really is what makes being on social media great, isn’t it?

How often do you look at what other makers are sharing on social media and think to yourself - “How do they have time to make all this CONTENT? Daily reels, stories, thoughtfully designed themes, not to mention the actual pots!” It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. This week on the podcast, we’re going behind-the-scenes with Hope Limyansky-Smith of Limyansky Studios who consistently posts 5 days a week while also teaching full-time to understand what it’s really like to create so much for social media.

What were you doing 15 years ago? Were you already making? Had you not even found clay yet? It’s amazing the twists and turns our lives can take, and yet, without them, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing today. On today’s episode, I sit down with Victoria Brook, who first introduced me to wheel throwing 15 years ago, when I lived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England for a year. A lifetime has happened since, and yet at the same time, in many ways Victoria and I both are coming full circle.

We’re kicking off Season 5 with a big announcement right at the start of my chat with Rebecca Harvey, the executive director of the Archie Bray. Rebecca and I also chat about the history of the Bray and her vision for the future, along with the pros & cons of traditional academic education and partnering (or not!) with galleries.

Have your friends ever marveled at how much you manage to get done? How you somehow work full-time and then also produce artwork on the side that you sell on the nights and weekends in your side-hustle? How often are we praised for seemingly “doing it all?” In our productivity focused culture, these accolades can feel amazing. But is it healthy? I am most definitely not the only one out there who’s been rewarded for their ability to manage numerous things at once. Gerald Brown knows this life well, and on today’s episode, she and I are debunking our often lauded ability to do #AllTheThings, and peeling back the curtain a bit on why. If you’ve ever chatted with Gerald, or listened to her own podcast (called Unraveling. Look it up!) it will come as no surprise that we also get into the big philosophical questions around how we make a living from the things we make a bit more than my usual pragmatic.

Goals… Are they something that’s fixed? Or something that’s flexible? I used to think of goals as rather fixed. You choose your goal, then put your head down and work towards that one, singular, (often random?) goal. Right? Hmmmm… Goals do give us guidelines. Without goals, we are constantly chasing the next shiniest thing. Before we ever got any traction on the last, now slightly less shiny thing. This week, as I chatted with Jono Pandolfi who produces ceramic dinnerware for some of the world’s top chefs, I was reminded that goals, while giving us a hypothetical finish line to work towards, are anything but fixed.

A lot of business advice talks about needing to find your ideal customer. That hypothetical person that you need to understand inside and out - from what stores they shop at to what value system they use to view the world. And while this is important, what most of that business advice does not tell you is that it is nearly impossible to figure out who your ideal customer is without first actually putting yourself out there and trying to sell your work. But of course, there’s a huge gap between initially trying to sell your work and learning who your ideal people are. Most of us wish we could skip through the awkward pre-teen-like business years of uncomfortable situations and conversations with non-ideal customers. I get it. I’ve been there. And while there’s no way to truly avoid those growing pains, a great way to be able to protect your own energy through the process is to know with absolute certainty that what you are doing is taking care of people. Not recommending the most expensive item in your booth because you want to make the big sale, but instead, recommending the item you genuinely think will solve the problem the person has described to you. While I could tell you all about how to define an ideal customer, at the end of the day, what I was reminded of during my chat with Makeda Smith is that all of this making a living from the things we make craziness starts with building relationships. Not only between fellow makers to help us through the unknown (as I talk about so frequently), but also in building relationships with the people we are meeting that may - or may not - buy our work.

As much as I talk about analytics, strategic decisions, data, systems and all the very pragmatic things about building a small business… Honestly, a lot of this whole making a living from the things you make thing is still ultimately, emotional decisions. But how can those pesky emotions help guide us in our decisions rather than derail us? We can't possibly trust every fleeting feeling we have, can we?If you are interested in diving deeper on the questions addressed in this episode - questions that require nuance and trust - you might want to check out The Community and see if it just might be the safe oasis you've been looking for. Learn more at: makersplaybook.com/community

In this chat, you are going to hear my unfiltered shock at how little I actually know about Maya’s personal life - proof that you do not have to overshare on the internet in order to use social media for strategic business growth, how Maya has pivoted her audience over the years through drastically different styles of making, and (equally exciting for me), how she changes her business model throughout the year based on what her personal life needs - Hallelujah!

When you dream about going full-time with your craft, what is the real job? Is it really going to be your hands in clay all day, every day? Getting to hit that coveted “flow state” in the studio because you finally have no other interruptions and can simply focus? I mean, that sounds like a dream, but more often than not, the big surprise for any of us starting a small business can be that the bulk of our time isn’t actually spent on the thing we think it will be spent on. Cara Steinbuchel of Cara Mae Skincare (and the beloved Potters Skin lotion) brought up this exact subject on our chat this week and we peeled back the curtain about on her “real” job while also laughing about it all along the way.

I think it’s a safe assumption to make that most of us enjoy sharing a story about how we made a piece we are particularly proud of. Or heck! We enjoy sharing a funny fail story about a flop on the wheel (once enough time has passed that we can laugh about it, of course). Now what if I told you that storytelling is actually all you need to do in order to sell your ceramics. My chat today with Naomi Clement is going to shed some light on how all sales really is, at least when done well and perhaps more naturally than your local used car guy - is simply storytelling. Which actually isn’t so bad.

Sometimes, making art can feel less important as we scroll through the news and battle with all that’s happening in the world. How can the things we make battle racism? How can a pot positively influence the needs of climate change? It sounds a little silly. Until we realize that culture is what changes the world. And art is uniquely linked to affecting culture and thus, change. Today’s guest, Kristina Batiste, creates minimalist ceramics that hold these huge subjects within their beauty and reminds me that the things we make can bring about the change we dream of.

The Launch series is a peek behind the scenes on launching our own ceramics business, Carra Terra. Sharing in as real-time as possible, the decisions we’re making and why, the lessons we’ve already learned, how we are sticking to a plan or pivoting based on new information and endless more details because starting a business is a wild ride!

There are few things in life I find more encouraging than finding colleagues who understand your life. With all do respect to our supportive loved ones, there’s just something different about the depth of conversation you can have with another person who understands how heartbreaking it can be when you bump that perfectly trimmed bowl you’ve been working on for days off the shelf or how thrilling it can be to sell your first pot. Only the people doing these same things really feel the same depth of those feelings with us. And if it wasn’t obvious from Part One of my chat with Lisa & David of Dault Pottery, when I get a chance to connect with others who are building their life in ways similar to my own, I’ll chat for hours. So we’re back for Part Two, which really only ended because the kiddos made us!

When I hear people talk about boundaries and cutting back on work hours and all of that beautiful sounding work/life balance stuff, I assume the person preaching this has already reached a certain point of success. I think to myself, “Well, of course you can cut back on your work hours now. You already have -insert whatever- going for you, so it's safe to slow down." But what if the very reason for launching your small business in the first place was in service of building an un-hurried lifestyle? I've said many, many times that we must choose our lives first and build our businesses around them, second, but I didn't figure that out until I messed up the order with my first business. On this episode of the Maker's Playbook, Lisa & David Dault share how they are ruthlessly eliminating hurry from their freshly full-time pottery business right from the very beginning.