Looking back, looking ahead, pt. 1
It’s time for a little reflection! Get ready for a deep dive into what worked (and what didn’t) in 2023. I’ll be diving into what’s next in 2024 in the next post!
“The more I know the more I don’t pretend to know”.
2023 was a year of internal growth. I took a business class with Holly Howard, which turned into an absolute flip-me-upside-down-turn-me-on-my-head-and-then-start-sort-of-experience. Holly seeks to provide business owners with a clear path to structure in order to allow for more freedom and creativity in our lives. The class was life-changing. When people ask me what I’ve been doing in the studio, I say we’ve been working on the foundation of our house-you may never see the work but the value is there and we are better off for it. In the past year, I have:
established values, vision, and a philosophy for Lauren HB Studio
became a w-2 employee
created cultural initiatives in the form of yoga classes, creative workshops, and field trips
created organizing objectives, a production calendar
overhauled my financial documents with a 5-year plan
created a marketing and brand guide
made a yearly accountability calendar for all my yearly short-term and long-term tasks
Through all this work, I have created more time in my year to be creative, make art, be with my family, and manage my business. It feels so good to have this structure in place and to work within it to grow and transform! I must give gratitude to Molly Fitzpatrick at Ditto House for introducing me to Holly’s teachings, and also to Holly for seeing me as I am in my business, and encouraging me to keep at it.
“Good pots require the ardor of vocation and the devotion of a lifetime”.
One thing I realized this year was that I wanted to create some space for myself and my staff in the working process. We are a deadline driven studio. We receive orders and must send them out in a certain timeframe. While I have operated on a made to order model in my direct-to-client side (that’s the pottery you see on the website), in 2023 we shifted to an inventory-based model. We now offer rotating seasonal collections (the spring collection is the first of the photo galleries above) as well as a perennial, always available line (Juniper, featured above). This allowed us to send work in a more timely fashion and created more room in our production schedule.
While we haven’t completely moved away from this in our wholesale work, we are well on our way to creating that space by stocking up on bisque inventory in our slow seasons (they don’t really exist, but it’s typically summer and right after Christmas).
I also explored (gulp) having my line made overseas and after many months, have decided to double down on in-house production. Material costs have soared in the last few years and for many different reasons. I will most likely have to shift my clay body to accommodate these costs and decided to explore getting the work made where certain clays are more domestic (England, Europe, China). While the materials and labor is much cheaper, after receiving samples and pricing it out, I decided this wasn’t a path I could take. I value supporting the local economy by creating a workforce. I enjoy working with people every day in my studio. And I value the work they do to produce the pottery MORE THAN I value supporting overseas production. It’s opaque, it’s out of my control, and it’s not how I want to spend my money. My husband and I are exploring producing a line that would be made in a different material. Conceptualizing first and finding the right material later allows me to keep my values tied to the production-I can find manufacturers with good labor practices and sustainable values this way. It’s been an interesting path to explore, but I’m really excited and proud to say that our work in made in-house from start to finish. Not every artist can say that.
“Creativity takes courage.”
Sculpture and commission work surpassed all my expectations in 2023. The biggest most sustainable moments are the breakthroughs I had while in Maine and the uptick in commission work. While in Maine, I forced myself to work with already fired clay, an idea I started exploring two years ago when I first visited for a monthlong residency. I worked in fabric, fired porcelain, and thread to make wall sculptures that feel exciting and full of energy and possibility. Some of these pieces haven’t seen public eyes yet! That’s for this year! The best part about this is that it feels like a long novel I’ve just opened and the first sentence is full of promise.
I worked with a lot of art consultants in 2023 to put art in public buildings. Most of these pieces also haven’t seen the light of day, and one of them even disappeared from a hotel! That’s another story, but the commission process is a long one but a lot of fun. Working with clients within my aesthetic to produce works for a space is in line with many of my long term goals for art making. I love making site-specific artworks, and I love working big with lots of small parts! It’s been a lovely blossoming in my career, one that will certainly carry me forward and that feels like such a right fit.
While it’s a fairly condensed version of the year, it’s a good summary and I would happily expand on any of the above subjects. Write me an email, let’s go for coffee, or a Zoom, or a walk. Or just keep following along here. Thank you for being here. It truly means the world to me to share these stories.
xo,
Lauren
