selling my pottery at an art market | studio vlog

Hello, my name is Anna. I'm a full-time potter and today I'm setting up for an art market in our little pottery studio. Our studio is on an arts campus that houses a theater, artist living spaces, a dance studio, and commercial studio spaces. In December, they host a market with food trucks and music and all the commercial studios open up for business. This is super duper convenient because most markets I do, I have to transport all of my pottery to a venue, but for this one, we just have to set up our studio and we can do it the day before, too. I start by putting price tags on all of my work. Most of my pieces are designs that I make regularly, so I have set price points for them, but for pieces that I don't usually make, I just price them off what feels right in the moment based on how much time I spent on them. I don't really have a hard and fast breakdown of prices based on material costs and time, but I have a general idea of what I need to be selling my work for in order to support myself. I don't usually make a lot of little planters, but last month I was feeling really really inspired, so I have a lot right now, so I decided to take a little field trip to the hardware store and I got a bunch of succulents to put in them to display on my table. And now it's time to actually set up the studio. Usually our studio is more equipped for making pottery rather than selling it, so to get ready for this event, we have to move some stuff around. We split our huge main work table and bring in two folding tables in order to have enough room for everyone to display their wares. This can be a little confusing to customers since the tables kind of hide our wheels and our kiln and thankfully our mess, but we get a lot of questions about where all of this work is made. I guess when we set up this way, our studio looks more like a store or a gallery rather than a working pottery studio. And for Santa Cruz Open Studios last October, we displayed our work on our ware board shelves instead of the tables and it looked a lot more like a pottery studio and made more sense to people. But this requires cleaning our shelves off and moving our wheels up and we were just not up for this kind of task today, so we went with our regular setup. I've been doing markets for four years now, so over the years I have acquired a lot of stuff. For my tablecloth, I use a painter's canvas drop cloth and then I just have all these crates that I've gotten all over the place. Some of them are from Michael's and then a lot of them are from thrift stores. I got this mug tower at Target. I really like using crates because when I'm going to a market somewhere, I can just pack all of my pottery in them, but also they're super versatile so I can change my display based on what kind of pottery I have with me that day. And then on the day of the market, I always wake up super thankful that I don't have to set up that morning and that I can just go to my studio and everything is all ready to sell. We had really great traffic at this market and I sold a lot of wares, but another reason that I really love doing markets at our studio is that it's really easy to work during them. I do get interrupted a lot, but I still painted a few things which always feels really good and it's interesting to customers. After a long day of engaging with people, we usually leave our pottery out until the next morning, but I am hustling right now and I have another market tomorrow, so I had to wrap up all of my goods and pack my car for the next day. And that was a day selling pottery with me. If you're interested in any of my work, you can visit my site. I'm usually sold out, but I restock every six to eight weeks and if you sign up for my newsletter, you can get a little reminder when there's more work available. Good night!