Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Anna Rooney. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Anna, appreciate you joining us today. Do you manage your own social media?

When I first started at Haand in early 2023, my role was the first time that social media came “in-house” at Haand. Previously, Haand had worked with a lovely local freelance social media manager who specialized in food & restaurants. Even with that collaborator doing a great job at their job and being well connected in our industry, we’ve found incredible value having social media run by someone who is literally sitting here in our workshop, where all our pieces are made.

The time it took to fully train me on our handmade process, ceramic shapes, and variety of glaze colors was required for all the rest of the parts of my job too (email marketing, PR, events, managing our retail space and its team) but would have been hard to share with a freelance & remote team member who wasn’t fully immersed in this building for 5 days/week. Having that institutional knowledge makes it easier for me to quickly identify products in UGC, check in our Shopify backend on inventory levels if I want to promote that post, and link to the product page when I share, and that can all happen pretty quickly.

Now, when someone asks a question in our DMs about a shape or a color or a promotion, I can walk over to that inventory shelf and respond to them with a photo or video. Lately, lots of our well performing content has just been my face on camera answering questions from followers. Being in front of the camera as a representative of Haand gives more life and personality to our social media which has been well received. It’d be tough to get that from a freelancer – could be confusing to audiences if the same face is answering questions on the grid for multiple local businesses in the same industry.

My advice to small businesses would be to have someone on the team (does NOT need to be a social media expert, just someone who is comfortable on camera) bringing their face and voice into the content! I took a lot of inspiration from Bill Flannery (@dcplateking) https://www.instagram.com/dcplateking/. I can just simply open up the camera, talk, and post! Everything doesn’t need to be fancy or overly edited. It’s better to have something up that has a medium production level than to have nothing up because you’re holding yourself to a standard of extremely high production value.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am the Community Manager for Haand Ceramics. We’re currently a team of 22 people, and over half of us are potters.

Haand has been in business for about 13 years, making handmade slip cast tableware and home decor in central North Carolina. We’ve been at our current location (a historic hoisery mill) for about 6 years. Until 2020, we almost exclusively a B2B business, serving the hospitality industry: making tableware for restaurants and boutique hotels. When our restaurant partners no longer needed to purchase plates and bowls during the pandemic, the team wrote a B2C business model and our retail/e-commerce arm launched almost immediately. Now, each one of the 1,300 pieces we make every week has about a 50/50 chance of ending up in either a home or a restaurant!

My background before Haand was mostly working in arts management and administration. I’ve done a lot of work in theatre, and I’ve enjoyed learning that a ceramicist is much more likely to be an introvert than an actor. But regardless of the medium, I’ve always found great satisfaction in working with and for artists as a producer, marketer, event planner, executive assistant, or chief of staff. Having access to arts and crafts has been a great joy in my life, and I hope that focusing on business needs makes it more possible for the artists that I work with and for to be artists.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I used to not think of myself as an artist, but then I read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and I changed my mind. Consider me one more in the long list of people who have recommended that book to you.

Any advice for managing a team?

If you don’t already, I advise setting up time for each employee to meet with their supervisor on a regular basis (I like every other week), one-to-one, and in a private room where they can speak freely. I try to go back and forth between just having open ended conversation (small talk can even be very valuable!) and having an agenda. I source my agenda questions online… just google something like “questions for one-on-one meetings” or “questions to ask your direct reports”, pick an outlet that you trust, and save any of their questions that speak to you!

Having this space to get their feedback makes it less likely that someone will be harboring resentment about some sort of miscommunication, or holding onto feedback about the cleanliness in the bathrooms that is ruining their daily work experience, or navigating a challenging relationship with a coworker… long before any of these things become a serious problem.

Years ago, I had a fabulous fabulous fabulous angel of a boss named Dawn. We had regular meetings that she always prioritized on her schedule, and she put a clear effort into getting to know me. This was at a big company (over 100 employees at our location, maybe a few hundred across the country), which could be an easy place to get lost.

After I had worked there for a year, had an outstanding performance review, and was feeling bored with my tasks at this job, I asked my boss for a promotion and more responsibilities. At a big corporation like that, she didn’t have any freedom to create a new role for me, and there weren’t any open roles for me to move up into. Long story short, she supported me in giving sort of an informal “long notice” to her that I was leaving the job once I found a more senior role somewhere else, without making any sort of big deal with HR. Over the course of what I remember to be about 2 months, I took interviews (she was generous with my schedule flexibility) and I found a wonderful new job that almost doubled my salary. And, more importantly for the moral of this story, she had much more than 2 weeks notice to find a replacement for me and get them trained.

Now that I’m a supervisor, I use this same philosophy. I want my teammates to be able to tell me about what’s going on in their life (a move, a new baby, a change in career goals, family responsibilities, a sick loved one) without any fear about the status of their job. Then, when they are ready to leave, or cut back on hours, or change industries, I’ll probably know much farther in advance… maybe even long enough so this employee can train their own replacement (which can be SUCH a gift) instead of me having to drop all my own responsibilities to recruit and train a new employee.

Plus – for me, work is really a lot more fun when I have gotten to know the people I work with!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.haand.us/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/haandmade/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Haandmade/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-rooney-b711ab2a/

Image Credits
Main image (of me in the apron on a porch holding the painted plate) credit is “Molly Harris for Half Mile Farm” No other images need credit.