Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
#244: Kate Schroeder & Thayer Bray (Kate Schroeder Ceramics) (pt. 1 of 2)
This week on the podcast is part one of our interview with Kate Schroeder and her husband Thayer Bray. Kate is the artist behind Kate Schroeder Ceramics, whose works are in collections around the globe. Before becoming a full-time artist, she spent nearly a decade as an educator, and spent several years working in non-profits. She also managed Accessible Arts, a not-for-profit arts organization which specialized in teaching art to people with disabilities. Thayer is a printmaker with experience as a shop assistant at the Lawrence Lithography Workshop, a gallery assistant at Crane Yard Clay, and teaches bookbinding, papermaking, and lithography workshops. Thayer also helps with many aspects of the ceramics business. Join us as we touch upon a wide variety of entrepreneurial activities in this interview.
In this episode:
Sometimes, life throws you a curveball, and for Kate, it came in the form of a viral video. What followed was a whirlwind of fulfilling orders and managing the chaos that follows internet fame. Through it all, it was her small but dedicated team that stepped up to meet the demand. From discussing her successful Braille jewelry line to her popular mini mountain burners, Kate shares the evolution of her production line. With a balance of fine art and production, the conversation traverses the highs and lows of the artistic journey and the surprising pathway to entrepreneurship.
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Announcer:Welcome to the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast. Making art work. We highlight how entrepreneurs align their artistry, passion and vision to create and pursue opportunities to capture value in the arts. The views expressed by guests on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the podcast or its hosts. The appearance of a guest on the podcast, the venture they represent or reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Here are your hosts Andy Heise and Nick Petrella.
Nick Petrella:haayer is printmaker with experience as a shop assistant at the Lawrence Lithography Workshop, a gallery assistant at Craneyard Clay and teaches book binding, paper making and lithography workshops. Thayer also helps with many aspects of the ceramics business. The website for Kate Schrader ceramics is in the show notes so you can learn more about her art exhibitions and art. Thanks for being with us, kate and Thayer. Thank you, kate. Let's start by having you tell us what it was like starting as a ceramicist after you finished your MFA.
Kate Schroeder:Starting in ceramics was sort of like starting from the beginning. My degrees are both in sculpture first and then ceramics is. In the show notes I made a lot of figurative mixed media sculptures that were really pretty concept heavy. And then my thesis was about kind of just like trauma, and so when I finished grad school I was like, well, that is done.
Kate Schroeder:I took about 11 months off of art making and then I decided that I wanted to. I didn't feel whole not making and I had just gone from nine years of school as getting an art degree. So I wanted to start making work. But I wanted the concepts to not be heavy at all and so I got a wheel and just started throwing pots and it was like my whole concept here is just make it cup and it can hold water.
Kate Schroeder:And I had learned how to throw when I was an undergrad but hadn't done that, you know, essentially all through grad school and I never got great at it in undergrad. So while I felt like I was kind of at this level with my work that was relatively honed, then I started to ram it and I was like I can't even center this clay anymore. So I really kind of just took everything that I knew and threw it out the window and started from scratch. So it was humbling, to say the least. But also I think that it was great to have to teach myself an all new skill and not have to rely as heavily on the concept and I could rely more on the craft of the material itself.
Andy Heise:Yeah, thayer, you want to give us a quick overview of your artistic journey so far.
Thayer Bray:Yeah, so I got my. I earned my BFA from University of Kansas, with an emphasis in printmaking 2009. We all know what happened in 2008,. So I didn't see any prospects for jobs at all. So I just started applying for internships. You know, just, I want to keep on doing art, I want to keep on making prints. But as, what does the world have?
Thayer Bray:And I got crickets from everybody except for a shop in, oddly enough, kansas City, and Mike Sims, the owner of Lawrence with a workshop, called me up one day. I actually I had, I had strep throat and I was a busser at a restaurant so I couldn't call in. So I got fired for not calling in, which I get it. And also I I wasn't pleased there and didn't didn't hide that fact very well. But you know, my Mike Sims called me up. He's like hey, you know, I know you wanted an internship, but do you want to get paid? And I was like, yeah, of course I want to get paid.
Thayer Bray:And then, you know, I worked there for a little less than a decade, started as just you know a shop assistant. I was sweeping the floors and grinding the stones and when I left, I was an addition printer, which I, you know, I learned a lot, not a lot not just about the technical aspect of it, but a lot about, you know, just real hard work. You know we all like to think we're hard workers, but then, you know, when we're tasked with it it's like oh no, this is hard work, not, not, not what I was doing before. So I just, you know, he stopped publishing and when I was the edition printer no publishing, no printing so I was out of a job, so I went down, basically downstairs. Lawrence lithography is in a larger building that the Belgers own, who are big philanthropists and art supporters in the city, and Kate actually, I think, was at the time in the Red Star residency, which was in the same building but just below Not yet.
Kate Schroeder:We did like. When you left Craneyard, I came in, you were at one staff meeting, you left and then two weeks later I was at the next staff meeting. So like you can't live without one of us for a little while here.
Thayer Bray:So I went downstairs and was like I talked with the gallery director. I'm like, hey, I've been, you know, putting up shows. I know how to handle art, I know how to handle 2D work, I know how to handle a little bit of 3D work like giving a job and thankfully they did.
Thayer Bray:So I was there for a while, yeah, and then went through one or two other jobs, was a mailman for a while and that income actually I think helped Kate really to buckle down and get out of academia and have the freedom to if this is wrong, kate correct me the freedom to actually like really invest in the job and really invest in her business. I was a mailman for about three years and like at the end of three years I had injured myself and was displeased with the job and she was like I need help. We're in a good place right now. We have income from this. Come work for me. I was also in the middle of a master's of business administration program from out of KU in Kansas, or not, ku UMKC out of Kansas City. So she's like use this, you're already getting this education. Like do the back office stuff for me, do some people production stuff for me? And yeah, and you know again, kate was you know she's talked about starting at the bottom, being a printmaker and being, you know, working in a print shop. You are, you have.
Thayer Bray:I'm not a master printer by any means, but I did gain a bit of mastery in the process and in the understanding like I was a master of the shop and then going to ceramics, which is probably the most brutal of the visual arts. You know I like to joke that in printmaking if you mess up, you can. You know, if the horse falls down dead you can beat that horse and it'll eventually get up and work again if you're good enough at it. For ceramics you've got to bring 10 horses because nine of them are going to die. You can't beat them up. I mean it's really brutal and seeing that, you know, having that transition from I'm a master to I know nothing about this process was again I think Kate said humbling, and that is something that I had a hard time transitioning to in the beginning.
Kate Schroeder:Well, if he did like to pretend that like ceramics isn't that hard, like before he started with me, there was lots of jokes about that and I was just like okay, yes, dear. And then when he started, it's like coming in all cocky, like, ah yeah, I got this, I'm a professional artist, I know exactly what I'm doing and I'm like no, it's not good enough, sort of. I think there was typical, I guess not typical, but tension. Not too many married couples start working together. Especially one of them is, you know again, not master. There's no mastering, I feel like, of ceramics. It's too big. But yeah, he's definitely gotten better. He does some of our prep work. If he rolls out slabs and cuts out shapes and you know, even in the beginning his shapes were real wavy around the edges and I'm like I know you can cut a piece of paper and it won't be like do the same here.
Thayer Bray:Ceramics is our deal.
Andy Heise:Yeah, we're gonna talk more about like those types of things here in a minute. But I'm just curious if either of you have family members who are artists like, did you grow up in an artistic family, or family who were business owners?
Kate Schroeder:When I was a child, my mother and grandmother a flower shop, but they sold that, I think, when I was in second grade, so I mean that was very early. And then my mom went back to school to be an occupational therapist which there's. She worked with kids and there was a lot of craft making there, you know, like teaching kids how to hold a scissor or something like that. But and my great grandmother? Well, actually my great grandmother was an artist who lived down in Carmel, california, as a retired career and she had a PhD in botany in the 1930s, which was kind of unheard of for a woman and then was a school principal and then became an artist and owned a small business of a gym and mineral shop out in Carmel. And then it was actually when she passed that she, with the inheritance my mom, was able to go back to school. So, yes, but only as like a very small child.
Thayer Bray:Yeah, yeah yeah, on my side I had a lot of cousins and people around me that did art. My parents were very supportive of the arts. My mom ran a textile business where she sewed bags and table runners and the like. It was textile visions, I think it was. I watched her not just make the work, but also she had a partner. So they were talking about taxes and they were talking about just the ins and outs of running it and also selling it. That's my effort.
Nick Petrella:So in your bio it states you have works in collections on seven continents. How long did that take, and was it through word of mouth or consistent marketing that helped you with your reach?
Kate Schroeder:It was basically through Instagram. I was doing local art, craft fairs, regional, for several years and then I sort of switched, changed my work which is not uncommon for me, just totally stopping everything and starting a new body of work. That started to kind of pick up traction online. When that happened, people were asking how do I buy this? I had never I had sort of put work online, but it was never a thing. I always felt when I was doing markets that this is a waste of my time to put it online, because if it sells at a market, or what if I double sell it? I was always worried about that. Finally, I put the work online and was kind of amazed at how quickly it sold.
Kate Schroeder:I was already in my last semester of teaching and I scheduled it, unknowing how this would go down. I scheduled it for the same time one of my classes started and so I was taking rule and pieces just started selling on my website like bing, bing, bing and I'm like what is happening? So I'd even told my class I have to take a 10-minute break. We're starting 10 minutes late. I just kind of went to the bathroom and watched sales coming in and I was like that was the moment I saw that online was truly an untapped resource and I decided in that moment to not limit it, because I had been kind of limited to regional sales for so long and so I didn't want to limit it to domestic sales. So I just was like I'll just figure out international shipping, if it happens.
Kate Schroeder:And then it started happening. And so then I was sending to countries that I could never have imagined and I think Canada was first Australia, then in Europe, then Asia, then South America. And I made a joke like, well, I've done it, I have worked on the seven continents that I can have worked on. And then, you know, thinking like nobody sells to Antarctica. That's insane, you know. And then one of my followers was like well, one of my closest friends is a scientist heading to Antarctica soon.
Kate Schroeder:If you have something small, I will buy it and she will take it to Antarctica with her, and so it was just a piece of jewelry and she took it, and there's a picture of it at the South Pole way back in my Instagram feed. That's from like 2018 or maybe 2019. But it was kind of surprising how fast it happened, where I think it was only about two years time. Selling online, starting to sell online, to reaching you know, my seventh comment.
Nick Petrella:Did you know, andy? They have 157,000 followers. That's a lot, and one because we just followed you. That's going to push you over now.
Kate Schroeder:Yeah, I'm getting close to that 158,000. You can't see the little numbers on there, but it's.
Thayer Bray:She's an ultra influencer. Now. Who knew your listenerships about to explode, guys?
Andy Heise:So if ceramics wasn't your thing, you know at least through your, you know your scope. You did sculpture for both your degrees. At what point did you say you know what I should do. I should start a ceramics business.
Kate Schroeder:Well, so, oddly enough, ceramics and clay is my first love. I took ceramics classes in high school and I was the first person at my high school my graduating class was like 800 people, so it was not small. We had a big art department that I was the first person in my high school history to go through ceramic sword. Once I took my first class I was like, oh no, this is it, you know.
Kate Schroeder:And it wasn't until I got to undergrad that I realized like I wanted to do sculpture because I could learn how to work with every other material and I wasn't limited to the one material. And so I did do so much mixed media. I did a lot of woodworking and metal casting and welding, and I really had my eye on learning as much as possible about all the materials when I was there. And it wasn't until after grad school that I went back to clay and I started to really get back into it. I did one show, a prox show, when I was in undergrad where I brought some terrible pots too and some sculptures. The sculptures were much better than the pots and I sold those and I thought that I was a very poor college student. And so a weekend, I think I made like $1,400 that weekend and I was like wow this is more money than I've ever seen.
Andy Heise:I should not let this be the last time I do that yeah.
Kate Schroeder:And then I went to grad school and didn't do it at all again after that and then when I started making all these pots, it's like, well, I got to do something with them. So I signed up for that same craft show and got in, which is just the Leigh Summit Oktoberfest so lots of family stuff, lots of also like beer gardens, things like that Like it's not an art show, it's just a street fair and saw some income there. But that was like the only show that I did that year and then again the next year who's the only show? And so it wasn't necessarily something that I thought oh, I'm starting a business, because it really started as a full proprietor where I was just a person making and selling work. I had no business licenses or anything like that.
Kate Schroeder:Sure. And then it's when I because at that time I was also working full time at the nonprofit and then I was teaching between like three and eight credit hours as an ad junk and doing that. So I'm a workaholic, but you know, there's only so much time in the day when you have two other, basically full-time jobs to make.
Kate Schroeder:So, and it wasn't until I started to build up more work, do more shows, seeing this as a business option. You know. Then I got like the LLC and started to kind of like think, okay, I'm going to do this as this part time, I'm just more serious about it. But it's when the outcome of selling work was really starting to outpace the paychecks that I was getting and I felt as if they were holding me back and so I left the nonprofit first. Then I intended to leave teaching, but I was asked by my alma mater for BFA to come back. So I started there again and you know it took me a little while to get fully out of the adjunct game. But then, once I was able to do that, is when I was really able to focus on trying to make this like a viable business.
Andy Heise:Yeah.
Kate Schroeder:It was when Thayer was a postman and we, you know we are very much so a partnership of. There has been Ems and flows in our incomes since we've been together. You know we've been together for eight years and over that time, some years I'm the breadwinner, some years he's the breadwinner, and he was sort of in that like he had a whole 10 job that I could be on his health insurance, which I had, actual health insurance, and that left them nonprofit.
Kate Schroeder:Yeah and so it was like well, this is the best time of any for me to try, and so I did. Luckily or no, there weren't so many light months where I was like man, we really got it only given to your paycheck, but it at least gave me the security blanket that I needed To be able to do it.
Nick Petrella:Yeah. So this next question is a business question and you know, thayer, notwithstanding that you are pursuing or have pursued an MBA, this is about when you started. So were you taught how to run an arts business in college? Where's your education focused mainly on honing your craft? And you can both answer that?
Kate Schroeder:Yeah, no, no, no, teaching whatsoever.
Thayer Bray:No, nobody yeah in fact, I haven't heard of an institution. Really, I talked to a lot of people who even go to grad school and they were like, yeah, we were taught how to be teachers and you know, and yeah it's. It's a frustration that both Kate and I have had that we went to school to be artists and we were Basically I didn't go in to get my MBA be cut or M MFA, because they were emphasizing oh you can, you can get your BFA and then MFA and then you can become a teacher. I'm like I don't want to.
Kate Schroeder:In my program no one ever told me that I could just be an artist. It was all about how to become a professor through undergrad and grad school and that is a. It is something that's shifting in education now, I think, with especially the younger generation of educators that are coming in. We can see our peers are Making and selling and the internet has really had a big impact on like before to do it. You either were doing like regional arts and craft shows or galleries, but often, unless you were like living the life out of your van and traveling the country to do the art shows, you didn't necessarily make a living. And I think now it's becoming more possible and professors are Teaching that like I have several friends still in academia that either their program has entrepreneurship as a Class to take or there is a part of the learning process in general. But I mean, if you went to school in the early on, it was your professor's mean how to be professors and that's what they were teaching you to do.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, yeah.
Andy Heise:And we talked a little bit about your product line. So I know you have like a production line and then you also have some more of like your fine art, more maybe, maybe more experimental or you know, Um, the work that you're currently doing, you know, talk about how, maybe the evolution of those, and, and how you kind of think, think about the balance of those two things.
Kate Schroeder:Um Well, I kind of knew that it would be best in this game to have a production line. Um, starting when I was in craft fairs, I.
Kate Schroeder:Was trying to have something that was production. I ended up, um, developing A braille jewelry line because I was teaching the accessible arts and I was teaching at the Kansas State School for the blind and so I had learned to read and write braille and had done that and that was the production line then. But it once I left KSSB and was kind of out of the community as much it didn't feel my place to continue as much with that um, but I knew I kind of wanted to find something. Else is a production, because it is so much easier to make something multiple times than it is to try to reinvent the wheel every single time. And I had made a few lines that worked pretty well, you know selling here and there and but then it was. It was usually. I will make them, put them on the website when they fill out Okay, I'll make some. And then our production line now is our mini mountain burners and all of their accessories and they are modeled after mid-century modern fireplaces. They're in these burners and the first one that I made of this.
Kate Schroeder:I had no intention of this being a production line, it was just a thing I wanted to make and I made it and, like I don't know November of 2019, and it was probably 10 o'clock at night and I was like I made this thing and I posted it on Instagram, like it's been living in my brain for a while. Now it's in the world, now it's out of here, it's into there, you know, and it's sort of exploded. And I was like Whoa, maybe I'm on to something. And then people were messaging me and emailing me like how do I get this? So, instead of the one, I made like eight, and then those about half of those sold to just friends and family before I even put them online. And then I put them online, those sold out and before like no, seriously, I need this, how do I get this? Like, I guess I'll try the pre-order thing. So then I did a pre-order. Then I was like okay, let's do a waiting list. So I signed up, I started a waiting list for it and within a week there was about 1600 people on the waiting list and I was like I didn't even know how to deal with these numbers.
Kate Schroeder:Like I had myself employed for a while and was like, uh, like so I hired my assistant, katie, because I was like I can't, I need the shape cutter because they're slab built so I need somebody to come in and roll out slabs, cut out shapes. I can assemble them. And so that was her job at first was like work for me for like three to five hours a week. Then it kind of like I would make as many as I could, but they're 10 colors, so it's like it was harder for people to like get the color they wanted. So then as a pre-order has to be the thing I can feasibly make like 20 and a month so then I was doing that and then the demand was still too high. I'd put them online, the pre-orders online, and within 60 seconds they were sold out. And so then I started adding more. Katie was able to put another job with hers and we started making 60 a month. They were all on pre-orders. Those would sell out within seconds of putting them online In that amount of time.
Kate Schroeder:That's when I was on fair like this is turning into something Right. A, I never see you because you're a postman and you work too much and you're in grad school. B, I will more help, please help. And so he quit his job. He came, we started doing it more full time. We got a studio outside of the house again, where we have about 600 square feet. It's a private studio so it's not like a lot of community coming and going. We all have a big three by five table to work on individually. In that amount of time we've developed accessories to go with the mini mountain burner, so we have match strikers and little log holders that hold the incense. We've also launched our incense shop where I wholesale from other small businesses and so you can just buy everything together, like you don't have to buy your thing and then not have an instance and go with it, you can just buy from us, yeah.
Nick Petrella:For our listeners. What's the dimension of the mountain?
Kate Schroeder:The mentions of the mountain burners, so they're about nine inches tall and about four inches in diameter at the widest point, but they have a thin one inch tube going up the top two. And we've now launched, like we have our ten colors, we have all these different patterns, we have a spreadsheet. That's how we do it, because they are still pre-ordered. We're eventually hoping to get to a point where you can just order it and we ship it, but the demand has still been too high. It is waiting, Like it's definitely after three years of sell out, sell out, sell out, sell out.
Kate Schroeder:Now it's not doing that as much, and every once in a while we'll have a video like go viral online and then we find a bunch of new people. And then it's like we had one few months ago that somebody else shared one that she had bought from one of our retailers. We both sailed in as well, and then she just shared it and her video went viral, and so we had quite literally just opened it to where they were always available, and it wasn't just on the order them on the 15th of the month and then they're gone, which is how the business model had been, and we had them just were like, hey, we're going to be a little quiet about this, but they're just on the website. And then overnight we sold 140 of them and we're like shut it down. We can't make more than our team of three. And then we even had an intern from PCAI and we're like this is we're a max capacity. We did get everything out on time, but that was a little bit of a mad rush for that. Yeah, thanks for listening.
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