We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Scarlett Pons a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Scarlett, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

As an artist and a business owner, I have taken many risks over the years to scale my business in order to become a full-time potter. Some risks are large like leaving my full-time job as an architect to open my own art retail space, and some are smaller like changing clays to experiment with a new line of work broadening my sales. Talking risk is part of the daily experience of a working artist and is the only way to scale up.

Besides opening my own storefront to sell my work one of the most significant risks I took to scale my business to a place that offered stable income while still allowing me to experiment and stay creative in clay was converting a line of my handmade items into a manufactured line. This was challenging on so many levels such as learning a new platform to sell on which is Amazon, saving enough money for a launch of 3 items, several years of reach to make sure this wasn’t going to flop and the most difficult the stigma of converting a line of your handmade items into a line of manufactured items.

One of my favorite aspects of owning a storefront are the conversations I have with customers that lead me to new ideas. I had a customer looking for a sponge holder and at the time I had no idea what this was. My husband, who is also a full time painter and muralist, and I only had the store for a few years. I was still fairly new as a business owner and as a full-time working artist teaching myself different handbuilding techniques and beginning to learn how to throw on the wheel. To meet my customer’s request I started making a single sponge holder using slabs of clay. My customer loved what I created and I continued to make more experimenting with different shapes, and colors and eventually throwing and altering them on the wheel. They quickly became my best-selling item and the only item that ever picked up traction online on platforms like Etsy. I was also beginning to wholesale these items to larger online stores. These sponge holders were our bread and butter and got to the point where it was pretty much all I was making and I couldn’t keep up with the demand of online sales. I was happy with the stable income but quickly burning out on making the same item over and over again and also started to worry that if I got injured this whole process would come to a stop. I also had no time to experiment with new ideas, test new glazes or expand my creative wings. This went on for several years before I started researching having these items made for me.

I did a deep dive into the history of ceramic manufacturing here in the USA and quickly realized I was about 50 years too late in finding an American company to work with. What I did find after a year of research was a family-owned American company, three generations deep, that have close relationships with ceramic companies that they partner with in China. They visit the facilities and have representatives overseas that ensure quality and work ethics. It was this company that assisted me in taking my handmade line of sponge holders and converting them to a manufactured line. This was exciting on so many levels- the idea that I could keep my popular designs on the market without me personally repeatedly making them and in turn freeing my time up to get back to what I truly enjoy about clay which is experimenting and making custom items for our store. But this was only the beginning.

While I was getting samples made of my items I was energetically looking for new ways to sell these items. I decided to no longer sell them on Etsy since they were not handmade and that would mean a loss of $10,000 of thousands of dollars. I started by reaching out to other kitchen-themed stores for wholesale accounts and had rejection after rejection because my prices weren’t low enough. I was determined to stick with a high-quality item something that I could be really proud of. Plus this wasn’t something that happened overnight- it was years of experimenting with different techniques, forms, styles, colors to land on these elegant unique designs I wasn’t going to give them away.

I realized that I would have to do what I have always done to be a successful artist and that is sell my work. This led me to Amazon. I read overbook, listened to hours and hours of podcasts and YouTube videos, and learned as much as I could before my items hit my front door.

I was confident yet extremely nervous about how they would do on such a huge platform. The years of selling them on Etsy gave me the confidence that they would sell. Out of the three designs, two were unique the double sponge holder and the sponge and brush holder. I’m proud to say that the double sponge holder was the first of its kind on Amazon. There was no double sponge holder when I launched in 2018 and now you can see variations of my design online. I take it as a compliment. I was nervous because if these items didn’t sell I would have thousands of units that I wouldn’t know what to do with.

Fast forward to the present day and six years of scaling my business up online has allowed me to keep my pursuing my passion of being a full-time potter. This year will be our 14th year in business and I have learned that you need a lot of diversity in your creative business to weather all the storms, recessions, covid, and bad weather to name a few. I love that I can be an artist who takes up space on Amazon and an artists who is active in my small city making custom work for my clients while also providing a storefront for other artists to sell their work. There is no one way to scale your business up but the answer is often right there if you are carefully listening.

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

I’m a self-taught potter with a degree in Architecture and my husband, who was also an architect and turned painter and muralist and I both left our professional careers after 10 years to pursue our passion of becoming full-time working artists. In 2010 we opened our storefront PONSHOP Studio, playing off our last name, in Downtown Fredericksburg, VA. Through our storefront, we sell my pottery, his paintings, and work from 20+ other local artists. Our storefront has become a staple in our community in revitalizing our historic downtown bringing energy back to our city through a variety of creative community events.

I have been working in clay since 1993 starting with a variety of classes in college then moving to co-ops in NYC to landing in Virginia where I continue to teach myself new techniques. I have two lines of work Handmade and Ready-Made. Handmade are items I make and glaze myself and mainly sell through my store and Ready-Made is my manufactured line that I mainly sell online. The items I enjoy making the most are items for the home. Meaningful items that people will use daily.

Pottery is my passion and after 14 years of working full time at this, I can honestly say clay picked me. The longer I work in this medium the more I want to learn about it and express myself through it.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

We had started planning our business while we still had our well-paying professional jobs. The best thing we did before we opened our storefront and went into business on our own was pay off all our debt- college loans and credit cards and then saved about $10,ooo to open the store. In 2010 this was just enough to get the doors open, buy some initial ceramic equipment and get started. We continued to keep reinvesting what we made back into the business and continue to do so.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

I have sold on Etsy, Uncommon Goods and currently on Amazon and Wayfair. These platforms have been key in helping me grow and scale my business well beyond our brick-and-mortar store. The pros are the client base on each of these platforms and the reach they have is huge. Once you find the “right” product that people are searching for on a specific platform your sales become very steady and consistent which is a dream spot, especially as an artist. The cons are that the clients are not yours but remain the clients of the platform. You are not building your own client base but theirs so it’s important that you are doing something else to build a client base of your own whether it’s through your own website, a storefront, consistent markets etc.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.scarlettwares.com
• Instagram: scarlettwares
• Facebook: scarlettwares
• Linkedin: Scarlett Suhy-Pons
• Youtube: Scarlett and Gabriel Pons
• Other: amazon storefront- scarlettwares