A ceramics teacher started making plates on the side in 2004, his $51 pasta bowls use about $1 worth of clay, and the business now does $6.6M a year with his dishes showing up on The Bear
In 2004, a ceramics artist in New Jersey started making dinnerware on the side as a creative outlet while he taught ceramics classes and worked for bigger manufacturers to pay the bills. When he lost his manufacturing job six years later, he took it as a sign and went all in, working around 60 hours a week on it.
The big break came in 2012 when a new luxury hotel in New York ordered over 6,000 pieces in a $100,000 deal. That's when he hired his first full-time employee, bought more equipment, and the business became profitable. Orders from big home retailers followed, and his plates and bowls ended up in hundreds of restaurants and even on the TV show The Bear.
The math on the product is pretty wild...an 8-inch pasta bowl sells for $51 but uses only about $1 worth of clay, though labor is the biggest expense by far. One large gas kiln can fire around 500 dinner plates in a single night, which works out to about $18,000 in potential revenue. Other than three loans of $100,000 to $200,000 each to buy more kilns, the whole thing has been funded by its own cash flow.
When COVID shut restaurants down, he pivoted to selling directly to home cooks, and that now makes up nearly half the business. Revenue more than tripled since 2020, hitting $5.2 million in 2023 and a projected $6.6 million in 2024, with a 30-person team unloading over a thousand pieces a day from 13 kilns.
note: derived from a CNBC article, the full version is here. The summary here is condensed by ai.