Hannah here, wishing all of you a very happy 2026! I hope you are all feeling refreshed after the holidays and ready to take on a new year. 

This is a very special year for me as it marks my 35th year in business. 30 years was the COVID era, and we had other more pressing issues to worry about, so I thought it’d be nice to mark 35 years with some new designs, some limited editions, and some fun throughout the year!

I started the business in 1991, as a fresh graduate from Bristol Polytechnic, where I did a degree in ceramics. I sold everything in my final degree show, so I decided it might be the best plan to set up a business, as I had some repeat orders for some of my designs. I found a studio in St George in Bristol and got on with making my commissions, mostly little black crows I had in my show, and some wall-mounted fish. Not much has changed in terms of subject matter all these years later! With the help of a grant from South West Arts to buy a kiln, I ran the business from there until 1999, when I stopped work on maternity leave. My daughter was born in February, and then 2.5 years later, I had my son. I didn’t really do any clay work in the interim. I did a bit of freelance work, but actually enjoyed the time off as I had pushed myself quite hard and was feeling a bit of burnout! I did find a studio when my son was over a year old, and started back again part-time and gradually rebuilt the business, still supplying some of the original shops as well!

Many years later, we are now based in Wiltshire. There are 2 of us full-time and 4 part-time, and we have our website and quite a few retailers we supply to. 

I never really run out of ideas and inspiration for new designs I want to make. From inception to new designs, being ready to sell can be a long process. I mostly enjoy the first bit, then get really frustrated or find the later stages challenging in other ways! Sometimes things need to be modified a long way down the line, I hate that! Sometimes they end up smaller than intended, which is also really frustrating, but a lot of the time it is fun to see the final designs in production, and not made by me, so I can focus on where my talents are best used. 

The marketing of the business has changed a lot over the years, and is one of the main challenges and costs. In the early days, I never had a website. There was no social media, so I would post photos to potential galleries I liked, and about 1 in 10 of them responded with interest or an order! Now we have to plan product launches, and work backwards in time to make sure we have a good story to tell, and show the evolution of the designs and the business… I am not good at this planning! But I am trying. We try to get across the sense of fun that is intrinsic in what I make. I think most of my designs have humour running through them, but not all, and so humour in how we talk about them and market them also seems important. But you don’t always feel like that. Some days I just want to be in my clay corner making stuff, doing work that isn’t too taxing, giving my brain a rest from it all. 

It is quite stressful running a business of any size, and we are no exception. We have faced some major challenges along the way. I set up in a recession, so I guess the humour has always been needed to weather the storms. We have had to get funding at regular intervals, increase staff, reduce staff, outsource, then do in-house; there’s a lot of trial and error, and cash flow is always king. I spend a lot of time looking at the numbers, holding online meetings with people who are involved or can help, planning, setting targets, missing them, smashing them and everything in between!

I have had some really amazing wins, getting into Liberty (without even approaching them), creating salt and pepper aeroplanes for Virgin Atlantic, being on The Great Pottery Throwdown several times, and selling to celebs like Ed Sheeran (he owns a Ginger cat money box!), Fearne Cotton was given a Flamingo Egg Cup, Paul O’Grady ordered from our website, there’s a few others, and that gives us something to gossip about at work! I have been interviewed for local news and lately in the Guardian newspaper in the Uk and Australia because an Aussie company stole my designs, so not a win, but I guess flattering?

Moving into 2026, I am now 56, and I am thinking about how I want the business to evolve over the next few years. I am looking at a few different scenarios that will allow me to take a bit more of a back seat, but I’m not there yet. So until then, I am creating a few special new designs for the next year, which we will launch during the year, so watch this space, folks! And also, if you have been a customer, a massive thank you! You have enabled me to follow my dream and continue creating crazy stuff out of clay for 35 years now! 

Hannah x