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Jeffery Liang | Episode 1253
Jeffery Liang, a Taiwanese-American based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California is the founder of Spiffy Pottery Studio. With a background in fine arts and industrial design, Jeff’s strong desire to create is at the heart of his work. Hand-made pottery perfectly combines these two passions. Jeffery’s journey into ceramics began in 2018 when he became a student at City College of San Francisco – Fort Mason Center. Jeffery quickly realized that pursuing ceramics was a path he wanted to develop further. A few months later, Jeffery began working at several pottery studios, both in San Francisco and his hometown of Taipei. In 2022, Jeff decided to take the leap and start his own venture, leading to the establishment of The Spiffy Studio.
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What was your biggest expense that you didn’t anticipate that caught you off guard?
Yes, I can tell you now is the attorney fee. This was the first time I rented or acquired a commercial space and you need a realtor for commercial property. Realty is different from residential and I learned the hard way because you need an agent that represents yourself. I’m sure many people know that, but I did not know that. And I just look for this face value and looked for their agent. He was representing both of us, which is not a good idea. So when they send their contract for the building, it’s over 30 pages in a language I don’t understand. And since English is my second language already, that feels like some language from our outer planet. And so I have to hire a realtor to look through the message and to Just help me out because I can’t understand anything. So that snowball into a big amount of amount of money and I really regret paying that. So for those for those wondering, if you want to do the same thing, you should find your own agent first.
When you looked at the very beginning about all the avenues of income, there would be classes and memberships and workshops and so on and so forth. Which do you feel now is the strongest part of running the studio that gives you the most stability.
Oh, it’s definitely memberships. But to be more detailed on these questions, I think when we give out inspirational spark for people, it’s hard to explain. When they, that’s to say, when they get addicted to clay, I think it all happens in the students’ space. And once they realize this is what they need, they turn it into membership. So membership is really stable for us. But I think the magic happens is when they’re students.
Someone told me that that you need to look at memberships the same way that a gym does memberships in that you over book your memberships because a lot of them won’t actually follow through, but they’ll stay members. Do you find that’s the case that you can have “too many” members?
I think it depends on where you’re at because some studio do that. We call a wait list. in terms of membership because people wants to get in. But in our region, in Menlo Park, I will say is seasonal because, for example, during the summer, like right now, we do have fewer members because people are out of town. They tend to not want to come to the studio. So I think it’s partially correct. So I would say I’m not 100% agree on that because that does not happen in our case.
Now that you’ve built out the studio and you are open and you’ve been going for a little over a year and a half or right about there, what’s a piece of equipment that you would buy differently?
Let’s see. I would say instead of a specific equipment, I would rather rethink my electrical layout for the wheels because that matters a lot. And some studios just plug into the wall outlets, but a little bit of electrical system in the building, it might overpower the breaker box, whatever it’s connected to. So we did a hard conduit from the ceiling and drop down, a hard line to each wheel. But that’s a really big commitment for the position of the wheels. Because nowadays I would really like to be more playful with the placement of the wheels. But with the hard conduits sitting like as this is right now, it’s a little bit hard to adjust.
What’s one thing administratively, like as a business owner, that takes up more time that you didn’t expect?
That is definitely answering people’s e-mail with all kinds of questions, especially when people want to set up their own private events and classes schedule rescheduling or setting up a makeup class. That’s, we didn’t think of, takes a lot of effort every day.
What do you do or how do you go about creating a welcoming culture amongst your members?
Good questions I think I think a lot of an atmosphere or welcoming culture is a byproduct of you doing the right thing. Because just like what people say, if you have a passion for a certain thing you do and it becomes your own business, you have more leverage and motivate yourself. I do have a certain passion for ceramics when we teach, when we build up the studio in many shows, a lot of effort that we’re willing to spill out. And that really triggers people such as student and members dedicate more time or talk to us more about their questions. It’s like a good cycle in a way. For example, last year, and this is exactly how we met through the video that you built your sink. That’s right. That makes me want to build my sink in the same certain ways. So I started building that and makes people think, yep, we really do care about the studio space because our old sink sucks. I think that effort shows we really want to build a community and we want to show the people that this is a space that we are further developing and always want to get better at it. So they’re willing to spend more time and effort to explore their inspiration on their work.
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