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THE MARKET
In the early years our production was all one-off pieces
intended for Gallery exhibitions. Jamaica is a small country with a limited
pottery buying public. It soon became obvious that we were not earning enough
from one or two exhibitions annually. We attended a few Craft Fairs where some shop
owners showed interest in the work.
We began to talk about opening our own outlet in Kingston where we had the
best sales. In this way we could get the best return while maintaining a small
wholesale clientele.
We eventually closed the Kingston location of the Clonmel Potters Gallery at the end of Jamuary 2005. In recent years we have seen an increase in both custom orders and wholesale requests with a corresponding reduction in retail sales.
Our new gallery in Clonmel opened for business in January 2008 . We welcome individual visitors or groups but require some notice to ensure that we are at home. We will provide a workshop tour and demonstration on request. We have also discussed the possibility of providing morning coffee, lunch or afternoon tea where required. 
Our most recent exhibition was mounted at Harmony Hall Gallery in St Mary in February 2008. We were able to show, for the first time, several pieces of salt glazed work. Salt glazing, which we have been experimenting with in recent years, is a new technique for us.The work was well received and we had good sales. We are presently working towards another exhibition which we hope to show before the end of 2008 in Kingston.
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This was eventually achieved in 1993 with the assistance of
family members. We promoted the Gallery by attending Trade Shows as well as
Craft Fairs offering our range from larger one-off pieces to small items as well
as special orders of custom made dinnerware sets , corporate commemorative items
and wedding and anniversary tokens. Unfortunately this venture had limited
success as we did not have the production capacity to maintain consistently high
stock levels and the cost of rental of a shop in the Mall was probihitive. We moved to a
smaller, less costly location with less traffic. We were still having more
requests than we could comfortably fill but we worked on improving on that
problem. We have found the bulk of the production to be (low return) wholesale and
therefore we needed to improve considerably on our speed and volume of output.
The dynamics of the economy have seen a gradual change since the 1980’s with disposable income where it exists going to high return investments. Increasing retail sales at either location was possible but at a far greater cost than we were willing to risk on expensive advertising in the print or electronic media.
