J M made some reasonable points.
As far as staying on the pottery topic, this one is pretty good--not too much
thread creep (meandering from original topic), mostly about both Land Rovers and
pottery... Although I'm going to creep it now. As any good discussion should be
allowed to...

Regarding not making enough money out of pottery - well you get what you put
into it.. It's the same in any self-run business.

Pottery is not the same as any self-run business. Granted that it could be, and
I've seen it run that way. The limits of the professional potter are first:
what one can produce, and second what one can sell. Being both producer and
seller makes a definite limit to what one is likely to earn. In other self-run
businesses, you can add employees to grow your business, or add machines to
increase your production. As soon as you add employees or machines to make the
pottery, the nature of the enterprise has changed. You then have a business
instead of a profession. Ceramics has always existed as a business, from
toilets to fine china, employing the industrial model (since the industrial
revolution). The industrial revolution nearly ended the craft potter's
existence, producing wares much more cheaply, and generally elegantly, than the
craft potter could afford to. That's still the case--99 percent of the world
eats off mass produced pottery. Craft pottery reemerged as a possibility first
in 18th C. England with the Crafts movement, then again with Bernard Leach and
Shoji Hamada championing it in the early 20th C. In the 1960's, there was
another craft movement as part of the anti-establishment back-to-the-earth
hippie thing, which most of the current professionals began with. Anyway, I'd
say there's a distinct difference between the solo craft potter and running a
pottery manufacturing business.

Getting back to the limits of income, some potters do hire workers, or mass
produce by jiggering or slipcasting. While I have no objection to their running
their business, I do object to them selling their wares as hand made at
hand-craft art fairs (which happens too frequently).
Getting somewhat back to the original point, I'm currently working on an order
for 800 little cups. As a solo hand artist, there is no advantage to larger
orders--each one has to be made with the same amount of work. I only do this
one large order a year--the rest of my production is in dozens. It consumes a
good share of a month to make it (although I'm also making a few other pots to
efficiently load the kiln).
I think for most of us the real sticking point is sales. I have no objection to
hiring someone to help with sales--the integrity of the work is not compromised.
It's just that I can't afford it. It would meand producing a lot more pots and
more art fairs/advertising to pay for the extra help. Selling pots is
hard--selling $20,000 or more of pots per year is consistently hard,
competitive, and boring. So we are a fairly rare group who are willing to
attempt survival under such conditions.
Brad Sondahl

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