Three Avenues of Sales | Rosemarie Durr | Episode 577

Rosemarie Durr | Episode 577

Rosemarie Durr is a Kilkenny based Irish potter who hand throws a range of contemporary stoneware tableware which is designed for everyday use. Rosemarie has a background in design and her distinctive powder blue and buttermilk white glazes are uplifting and fit into every home and lifestyle. The pots are thrown finely and are light to the touch. Rosemarie shares her studio and shop with ceramic artist husband Andrew Ludick.

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When you first started was direct sales the only source of income from ceramics for you?

Yes, because I was in a studio that had a shop attached to it and we were in a busy touristy spot it was only people coming in off the street and buying. That was our turn over. But it didn’t take very long before someone came in who owned a shop and they asked, Would you supply my shop? And I said, Sure! That was probably 18 or 19 years ago and I still supply to that shop today. So initially, yes, it was just purely what we sold from there. Once you gain a bit of confidence in what you are making and felt it was working, then I did a craft fair and it would be a Christmas craft fair in Dublin. It is a really big show. It is the main one in the country in December and that would be three or four days selling direct to the public.

How important was that immediate feedback from your customers for developing your lines and for also understanding what would work and what wouldn’t?

Yeah, it was important but I also, a lot of the customers I had at the beginning were tourists. It was actually a lot of Americans because of where it was situated. There were a lot of tourists going through. So I couldn’t confuse what the tourists wanted and what maybe the locals or the Irish customer wanted. They weren’t always the same. So I quickly developed pots that I knew the tourists liked to bring home a souvenir and maybe function wasn’t as important to them. The contemporary table ware was developed more with the Irish customers in mind. So that feedback was important because it did make me realize not everybody wanted the same thing.

With the wholesale, did you go after any shops yourself, or was purely organic in terms of growth?

I was approached by a couple of shops initially but then I went to a trade fair in Dublin, I probably did it three or four years, and I would have been exposed to the bigger chains where they order multiples of items. That didn’t go organically, I actually did go to the shows.

Was there a sense of freedom when you sold wholesale as you didn’t have to be there for the sale to happen, you could be in bed asleep or you could go on vacation?

I certainly wasn’t in bed asleep because the orders were quite large. I didn’t have kids so I could work a lot. I worked six or seven days a week often, when I look back at it, because I could. No, there was no sense of freedom with wholesale. It was hard work and the orders never seemed to end. That was the hard part, you know, you would get the orders out and you would have that feeling, Oh, that’s great. But then they were coming at you as quickly as they were going out. I needed to do it. I didn’t have any other ties at the time, so it was okay.

You mentioned you enjoy your present wholesale customer because they pay on time. Does that mean you had previous wholesale customers that did not pay on time and they were making like difficult for you because you had to chase down the money?

I don’t know if it’s the same in the states, but here the bigger shops, the ones with the chains, the ones with buyers, the ones that didn’t have relationships with each other, they were really hard to deal with because they didn’t pay on time and they would push you as far as they could. At one stage I remember one particular shop owed me about 4 or 5 thousand euros and at the time that was huge for me, just a small maker on my own. And my accountant who was a good friend of mine, she said, you can’t be owed that much because if they go broke in the morning, it is too much money to be owed to you. They were overdue by 2 or 3 months. So she was great, she got on the phone and got talking to the right person and threatened to go in there on Saturday morning when they were at their busiest and take my work off their shelves. Because it still belonged to me, that was part of the terms and conditions. It didn’t belong to them until I was paid in full. So she kicked up a bit of a stink so they then wrote a contract that they had 30 days credit and that was it. And I didn’t have any more trouble with them to be honest, they did pay on time after that.

Have you found that people outside of Ireland are interested in your work now and are wanting to buy from you?

To a degree, I mean I have always had a healthy enough American sales. There are countries, like France, you sell more to and you wonder why. Is it because I am getting more exposure and they find my website? Or is it that they come across it and it appeals to them. I am not so sure on that. I just know with online sales you have to put as much work into it as with actual sales. Like, it’s not an easy route, I find anyway, you have to invest time and effort into good photographs and a good website and good content and really work at it. It’s not just stick a photo online and I’ll be fine. It’s hard work and it’s not work I like doing. I like interacting with people and I like working in the shop and I like doing nice displays. So you get from it what you put in.

How did two potters end up meeting in Ireland and falling in love?

This is not the first time I have been asked this question. If you google far enough back there is an article written in the local paper and it was titled, A Love Affair with Pottery. We had to take a bit of teasing for that. Andy was backpacking through Ireland and stopped off in Kilkenny and we met and the rest is history. He was in fine art, he had a degree in fine art and illustration when I met him, so he had never really done that much pottery. In the early days when I was really busy with wholesale he really was mucking in and packing kilns and pugging clay and doing all that crappy work to support me and then he slowly started to express art through ceramics and now he is the film star and I am just the pugger. And that’s fine, I am quite happy.