The new Small Pottery Wheel monthly update: April

Hi everyone and welcome to April’s edition of our monthly updates, all about our new pottery wheel! I know there will be a lot of people reading this who would have missed last month’s post, so I encourage you to go and read it if you want a full overview of the process up to this point!

 

This month was a big one for us in terms of testing. Since the end of March, we have done a lot of back and forth with the agency that is helping us with the design-for-manufacture of our wheel. This was because there were parts of the new design we felt didn’t function in the way that we wanted, or amends needed in the electronics. Every day we were tweaking the design and testing it over and over, until about a week ago when we were finally happy and ready to approve for manufacture. This is going to cost quite a bit so we wanted everything to be the highest quality possible.

 

At this point in a product development timeline, one then sends off for a prototype to be made. These prototypes are (very expensive) one-offs that show you exactly how your product will look and function coming out of the factory. So we decided to have 4 made, and we chose some colours based on our current best selling wheels. The four colours are the tiles in the cover image.

 

I then put a poll up on my instagram stories to get an idea of which colour was most popular, and the results probably aren’t that surprising! Sage Green got 38% of the vote, teal blue came in second with 30%, pink third with 18% and our Apple green coming in last with 14%.

Realistically we will start our production with just 2 colours (sage green and teal blue) as each colour requires a run of a few thousand bodies! After this we will review and hopefully add more to the mix. I will of course keep you all posted on that front!

 

So, our wheels are almost ready for full production! The next few stages are expected to take around 10 weeks, which means we should be ready to start shipping in July. I know this is a bit later than we initially said, but we spent a little more time than originally budgeted getting the design up to our high standards. I understand some of you will be frustrated by this, and I do apologise for the delay. Neither myself or my partner have ever designed a factory-manufactured product before, so we are having to learn all these lessons the hard and fast way!

 

This brings me nicely onto patents. We have finally got all our patent documents written, drawn and are just waiting for the go-ahead! This is super exciting because it means I will soon be able to share with you guys all the amazing new features and design our wheels are going to have! So keep an eye on my Instagram for all the deets 🔥

 

But for our die hard fans and ‘I-can’t-wait-to-get-my-wheel’ers, we have some good news; we will be doing a drop of our current small pottery wheels at 5pm BST on the 30th of April, and it will include almost all of our previous limited edition colours! So if there was ever a wheel colour you had your eye on in the past, now is your time to nab it! Our drop will include:

Blue

Green

Red

Orange

Black

Pink

Stone

Sage Green

Pastel Mint

Yellow

 

What’s not to love?? So set your alarms and get ready for the ultimate drop of hand built beautiful classic wheels! 

You can use your pre-order deposit towards the purchase of one of these wheels if you wish. To do so, just take the 16-digit code from your deposit and paste it into the ‘Gift Card’ box at the checkout.

(If you haven't purchased a pre-order deposit and would like to, you can do so here)

Thank you again for your support of our small business! We are so excited to share the new wheels with you as soon as they are ready, so keep an eye out for the April blog with all the details and updates.

And if you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us!

Happy potting all

Daisy & Stefano of Small Ceramics 🩵