Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Ryan Rakhshan | Episode 608
Ryan Rakhshan. Teacher, glaze designer, and kiln technician. Ryan occasionally makes a pot just to make sure his glazes and kilns are working.
SPONSORS
You can help support the show!
Number 1 brand in America for a reason. Skutt.com
For all your ceramic needs go to Georgies.com
I am excited that you are starting this company together. What did that first spit wad conversation go when you where just spitting things out there and seeing what would stick? How did that first conversation go,do you recall?
We had already developed…so both of the people that I was starting the business with had been in my glaze chemistry class. They are professional potters themselves and they were interested in the class. So we developed two glazes with them and then we were like, These glazes are awesome. Maybe we should sell them. I think the first two months after we decided we should sell things was just trying to figure out a good name. Figuring out a name where the social media accounts hadn’t been taken and the gmail account hadn’t been taken and the url hadn’t been taken was probably the hardest hurdle in the first couple of months. For two months straight we would send each other messages on Instagram with name ideas. I don’t remember any of the good names now but I remember there being some really hilarious ones. That was probably one of the hardest parts in the beginning. Figuring out what to call it and I guess figuring out how to split up responsibilities but it has kind of all trickled out pretty nicely as we have gone along.
Could you do this alone?
Oh, absolutely not. No. There is no way I could do the things that Meg and Gary are helping me with right now. If I tried I might have one glaze ready because I wouldn’t have any time to do any testing. I would just be too busy worrying about LLC information and taxes and website stuff. I would rather just test the glazes and have other people deal with that.
So it’s a three way partnership. Who is ultimately in charge? Is there someone in the group that makes the final decision?
Oh man, that’s kind of a loaded question I guess. So different things filter out to different people. I think Meg and Gary have a really good eye for what would be a nice glaze and what people would be interested in. So I think aesthetically speaking, like the aesthetic direction of the glazes are mostly those two. I tend to be the one who would say, This doesn’t feel ready and I don’t want to put this out into the world yet. So that decision tends to be mine. But I would like to think, I am probably wrong, being the type a person that I am, I would like to think that they have equal input into most of the decisions.
When it came to actually launching the business, how did you guys go about funding it?
Well, so I have been saving up for a house for a few years now, so I kind of fronted it myself. I thought, You know what, I think that this has potential and I will dip into my savings and we will make this work for a little while. We are still not actually in the black yet but we are getting really close which is nice.
How are you tracking the expenses the the income so you know when you have broken even and when you can pay yourself back?
So in the beginning we just had an excel sheet and we were tracking everything but after we got a bank account and a Wix account those two things have really helped us keep track of that without the excel sheet. We still use the excel sheet but you can more or less just look at the bank account and see what money is going out and you can look at the Wix account and see what money is coming in or the Square account. Meg deals with Wix and Square. So she deals with most of that. So it got easier over time.
How did you know the market and who the potential customers is and what kind of glazes they would like? How did you know what to go after?
Well I have been teaching at community studios since 2011 was my first community studio job. No matter how many glazes you have at a studio, I have worked at places that have had 30 5 gallon bucks filled with different glazes which I think is just immense. That’s insane, right. Even when you work at those, some body in that studio will be like, I want Amaco Cosmic Teadust or whatever. And they will go out and they will buy that. So I know there is a market in community studios because I know that people want to make their own work and they want to make it theirs. And I know that some of the glazes that I developed during that class were novel glazes and I hadn’t seen anybody produce anything quite like them before. So I just felt like there was a niche to be filled and I knew that people would be interested in something new and something different.
How are you keeping track of your existing customers, the people who have purchased from you?
It’s small enough right now that I kind of know them all on a first name basis, via Instagram and Wix. So Meg does most of the shipping but every time we make a sale my phone dings and I look at the name of the person and the state that we are sending it to and there is a couple of people who every time we launch a new glaze they buy it. So I know that if people are doing that then when they bought our fist glaze they liked it and it was worth it to them to buy another one and to see what else we have. There are some people who have bought every single glaze we have whom we have never seen in person. They are just out there on the internet. They will post and tag us on Instagram which is really rewarding to see that people are enjoying what we are making.
Do you guys have your own hashtag?
Yeah! I will hashtag midnightglazes or just midnightceramics. And then we are @midnightceramics as well.
Do you keep track of the hashtag and do people know to use it so it becomes a community conversation?
We haven’t pushed it yet. I don’t think there is enough of a customer base yet. We could start pushing it with some of our more active Instagram customers. But I tag all of our posts with it. Someday it could grow into something people would be inclined to use on their own.
What makes you think you can take on the amazing glaze companies that are already out there?
I don’t want to take them on, so to speak. That was actually one of the first conversations we had when we started. Meg was like, If we ever become Amaco, I am out. I just want to be the food truck of glaze companies. Is how we kind of put it in the beginning. We would like to be a food truck and we don’t want to be Applebee’s or even your neighborhood family restaurant. We want to keep it small and agile and different. I think that the stuff we are making is very different from the stuff that is out there in the market already.
Book
Contact
Instagram: @potsbyryan & @midnightceramics