“I needed to take it slow and just do what I could do on my own.”
Tell us about handling that exposure and then navigating that at such an early time in your career.
You have to be ready. Have to have stuff in stock, which I didn’t have anything in stock when it came out. Overall, it’s luck. I was with the right people at the right time. But I think that, looking back, I definitely did not take advantage of it. Because there are companies that get ready, have it in stock and they sell out. None of that happened to me. I just had to literally email everybody back being like, “Sorry, I can’t.” But it was just me too, so I think I’m still okay with how I went. Because it would’ve been too much growth fast and I wasn’t going to be able to handle it.
Tell us about that moment when you transitioned into doing more ceramics, interior design, objects, and furniture making.
My background is interior design and I was doing my master’s in furniture, so I was just designing, posting on Instagram and I got approached by Sight Unseen, it’s a press company. Monica and Jill used to do these trade shows called Offsite. So it’s all this young, furniture designers would come and do a trade show and it was really fun, vibrant. You have to pay, obviously, a fee to rent out the space. They didn’t know I was a student and I didn’t tell them, but I basically told them, “I’m in Savannah. I don’t have five grand. Sorry, I would love to, but I really can’t.” And they partnered me with Levi’s. So Levi’s paid for the space and we did a whole partnership and that’s how they brought me to New York.
What ceramics were you making that they were attracted to?
They were from my residency and they were these huge wheel thrown terracotta vases that I would put a glass on top and people loved that. So there were big vessels. I also had things that I did myself, chairs and a vanity that I did in school. So I designed a whole setting and that hit everybody’s attention because it was millennial pink, terracotta, velvets and big plants. For some reason, it was in every press, everybody loved that image. And I got lucky. I did that and then people started asking me prices. I didn’t know what a trade show was. I was like, “Wait, what?” So I had to make myself get ready for all of that, fast.
I needed to take it slow and just do what I could do on my own. Except I took a project from an architecture company in Canada, in Toronto, they were doing a restaurant. And basically, they hired me to do all their art vessels and their lighting. So that was a huge project that lasted me a year and basically helped me buy my kilns and pay for a studio space in New York. I was transitioning from Savannah. So that was the start of it, which was about six years ago. And again, they also didn’t know I was in school. So I just fake it really hard.
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wazup.