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Jannalyn Bailey | Episode 883
Curious Clay, founded by Jannalyn Bailey, was born out of an intense love of the handmade form and the desire to make attainable art objects. As a former painter, the presence of the artist’s hand in Jannalyn’s works is very important to her. Both the clay form and the glaze application retains the gesture from Jannalyn’s hand. Being somewhat self-taught, Jannalyn’s work is primarily slab-built with some element of hand forming/sculpting. Jannalyn hopes her works can live in new homes, and be a part of the slower moments in the day, whether it’s your morning cup of coffee or afternoon meditation. Jannalyn finds great joy in creating one of a kind pottery, and her hope is that that joy comes through.
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When you get involved with a faire, it’s an application process you don’t just sign up and do it?
Yes. Like I said, I applied two or three times and I was denied all the times. The way that I actually got on there was that a store in Georgia requested that I be there. So when a store requests that you as a brand be there you are an automatic shoe in I guess.
For the purchasing side do they need to go through an application process also?
I don’t know. I think that they vet everybody and make sure they are a brick and mortar and not someone who is trying to do cheap Christmas shopping. And then if it is a store that is online only that is a big marker on their profile page. You can also reject orders on there if I don’t want my stuff to be sold on a web only platform I can say that this is not a good fit.
How are you actually found by others?
I believe it’s just searching around scrolling through pages of pottery. There may be some tags but I am entirely unfamiliar with the buyers side. As I maker I cannot really click around and see other maker’s offerings very easily.
So you can’t see how much other people are selling their wares for?
I think I can if I were to log out and go on to the Faire website just as a browser, you know, somebody who is looking around on my own, but I can’t navigate away. Not that I know of.
Did you price your work upwards to compensate for the cost of doing business with Faire?
Yeah, and I have had to raise prices for a number of reasons. Partially because there are more people working for me now. Partially because shipping supplies cost an arm and a leg to even get to my door. The price of electricity, the price of clay, I did move away from an area in Pennsylvania that had a ceramic supply store that offered a pretty hefty price breaks at certain weights of clay and my current clay supplier isn’t able to do that.
Who pays for the shipping?
The retailer or if the retailer is a Faire insider, which I think is a monthly fee of a hundred and something dollars then Faire covers the retailer shipping. So if a store does a lot of ordering on Faire it really behooves them to be an insider. I never pay for shipping. I pay for shipping supplies and if you want to add a packing fee to offset your cost of shipping materials.
Does the shipping system Faire uses allow you to use the free boxes from the US postal service? Priority mail?
So when you punch in the weight and the dimensions it populates UPS, FedEx, and USPS and it gives you three prices and recommends. What box you put in it doesn’t really matter. I am never shipping in anything smaller than a 13 inch cube. You have an option on Faire to make your own label and then you have to upload the cost of that label as well as the tracking number and then they reimburse you.
What is the most appealing thing of working with Faire?
It’s just the reach. I mean my work at this point has gone to Germany, England, it goes to Canada all the time. And the U.S, I mean I don’t want to say I am in all fifty states but I’m pretty darn close.
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Contact
Faire: curiousclay.faire.com
Instagram: @curious.clay