The new Small Pottery Wheel monthly update: August

Hello everyone and welcome to our August status update!

This month has been insanely packed with all types of activities for Small Ceramics. For ease I will go through everything in sections so you can jump to whichever part interests you most!

Classic Wheel drop

We spent the first half of August making a huge batch of our classic 3D printed wheels after taking the decision that having something on our site was better than nothing.

This decision was met with some anger and irritation from a few of our customers who felt they are waiting for a new model that will never come. This is of course not the case, we have put the classic wheels out for people who want one right now and aren’t too precious about which model they get. I still firmly believe the original model is amazing and is more than capable of meeting people’s demands and expectations, as reflected in our many 5-star reviews!

Anyway, we will be keeping our website well stocked with our amazing 3D printed wheels, in an array of different colours, so if you’d like one today, they are ready for you to buy!

New Wheel

As previously stated, due to issues out of our control and quality problems with our former manufacturing partner, we have had to had to rework a lot of the components of our new wheel. We’ve spent August vetting new partners and manufacturers and we have finally completed our searches. To get to this stage, we’ve had to essentially educate ourselves from scratch on complex electronic and technical manufacturing to aid us in our selection process of new agencies to hire. I feel incredibly blessed that my partner has been able to do this, and every day I understand more acutely how difficult product design and development is!

Anyway, now we have people in place that we trust, we can plot out the timelines for when each stage of the new design will be completed.

When will it be ready?

The million dollar question, with a million dollar answer. As soon as the above is completed, I will be releasing a production schedule that clearly shows what stages we will be at and when.

Argillá Italia

As I write this update, we are returning from a week spent in Faenza, Itay where we were a technical exhibitor at the large international ceramics festival, Argillá. It was wonderful to be surrounded by hundreds of ceramicists from all over Europe in such a beautiful city, but boy was it hard work. 12 hours a day of demonstrating in 38 degrees heat is enough to knock anyone for six, but more than this the issues we encountered with importing goods over the border from the UK meant that we weren’t actually able to physically sell a single wheel at the fair!

But we did meet a lot of new people and do many demonstrations, helping to spread the word about Small Ceramics to a whole new continent and make some great contacts along the way. It was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience!

Many thanks go to Stefano’s sister, mother and father for coming along and helping us out for the 3 days it was on.

So that concludes the majority of our activities for August. I think that September will be even more hectic, so stay tuned for our next exciting blog post!

Thanks and as always, email me with any questions about anything pottery related…

Happy throwing, Daisy x