How to start a ceramics side hustle

Ceramics is fun, but pottery is starting to overflow from my kitchen cabinets and clog up my shelves. I’m just about at the point where I want to share my work with a wider audience, and earn some sweet side hustle bucks while I’m at it. Instagram has been a source of inspiration not just for some absolutely gorgeous and creative works, but also to admire other artists that have built up their ceramics practice as a form of income.

I work a full-time job so pottery would have to truly be a side hustle. I want to bootstrap this, and maintain a semblance of work-life balance, so the approach of micro-batching sales really appeals to me. This business plan entails creating a body of work, building hype around a sale window of a specific time, closing that sales window and processing the shipments.

This effectively breaks down the work in very discreet, defined sections. Creating the pottery collection can be done over a flexible amount of time, but then you dedicate a block to photograph everything. A block to upload listings online. A block to market and sell. And a block to package and drive everything to the post office. It’s a quick, effective way to ramp up. To test your batches to see what’s popular. To be able to schedule when you work and when you create. You can’t do that while managing an always-on storefront, or when constantly taking on custom requests.

My brain likes to jump around when I get focused on something, but building up a side hustle or any sort of business requires a huge array of moving parts. I’ve listed, not in chronological order, a series of posts detailing the process of building up a pottery hustle.

Last updated: June 11, 2022

Online Marketing

• The best start-up website hosting
• Using Instagram to drive engagement
• How to automate Instagram posts

Pottery

• How I acquired a studio space without building my own
• Get your own custom made pottery stamp for $20

Finances

• Setting up a separate Tangerine bank account for my business